Business

Saturday October 31, 2009

Expert advice on China and India

By THEAN LEE CHENG


CHINA and India are important to Prof Dr Anil K. Gupta for several reasons. One is his native birthplace, the other is that of his wife, who is the co-author of his latest book, Getting China and India Right.

Prof Dr Anil K. Gupta ... ‘What is happening today is delayed industrial and technological revolution in China and India.’

More than that, both countries have become huge research grounds for much of his work.

“Writing this book has been a personal and professional journey for both of us. We were born and grew up in India and China respectively. We had our early education in our native lands and started our professional careers there. Each of us also made the United States our home for over 15 years,” says Anil.

But he will be changing his place of abode soon. He and his wife, Haiyan Wang, and their twin girls, Meili and Anjali, will be moving to Singapore soon when he takes up his position as professor of strategies at INSEAD, Singapore, an international graduate business school.

“We have the best of three worlds – China, India and the West,” he says. There may come a time when they may wonder where they should stay – India, China, Singapore or the US, he says in jest. That is a nice problem to have. For the time being, he will just flow with the current and go where his work takes him. But by no means was his latest book conceptualised because he and his co-author went along with the current enchantment surrounding the two of the world’s fastest growing economies of the world.

Both feel for the culture and history of their native lands which, for some 20-odd years of their early lives, they were part of that progress and reform. And though they may have made the West their home, they had a finger on the pulse and growth trajectory of their birthplace.

Today, Anil is widely recognised as one of the world’s leading experts on strategy and globalisation. He is the Michael Dingman Chair in Global Strategy & Entrepreneurship at the Smith School of Business, The University of Maryland at College Park, the United States.

Wang is the managing partner of China India Institute, a research and consulting organisation and draws from her experience in China, Singapore, Europe and the US.

They have both produced a book to help business leaders develop global strategies in the two countries. “It is not China or India, but China and India,” he says.

Because of their background and training, it is a robust book thick with facts and figures. “It is not a book written by journalists or political scientists, but by strategy experts,” he says. It is also a book endorsed by some of today’s top CEOs in China and India, whose names appear in the international business press.

The crux of the book: The next 10 years will transform the world more than any 10 years in the last 200 years because in 10 to 15 years, China’s gross domestic product will be bigger than that of the United States.

Says Anil: “What is happening today is delayed industrial and technological revolution in China and India. Because technology and capital move much faster today, it is not surprising that economic growth that took 100 years to make Europe and the United States rich may now take only 20 to 30 years.

“In the 19th century, it took Germany, Britain and the United States 50 years of industrial revolution to double their per capita incomes. China and India are now doing it in around 10 years,” he says.

Anil says there is no way for Japan’s economy, currently the second largest after the US, to become No.1 in the world. While it did join the rich people’s club, it did not transform the world’s economic structure.

In contrast, China’s per capita income has to reach only about one-quarter that of the US for its economy to become the world’s largest, because of their population size and buying power, he says. “China at 1.3 billion population and India at 1.1 billion are not just two other economies joining the big leagues. They are actually transforming the structure of the global economies,” he says.

They will pack a powerful punch because they represent four stories rolled into one: fast-growing megamarkets for every conceivable product and service; they enjoy some of the lowest wage rates; they produce annually the largest pools of scientists and engineers in the world; they are launching pads for new global competitors.

Anil says many countries have one or two of these important features, but none of them can claim to have all four. Only India and China can. While there is much euphoria and exuberance about these two up and coming economic powers, what of Malaysia?

“Malaysia cannot compete with either on cost. Malaysia has to move up in terms of science and technology and to do it at a very rapid pace or it will be stuck where it is. It boils down to your education system which has to be world class and in order to do that, you have to have the will power.

“A country may be blessed with natural resources but technology is something that one can acquire. And the building block of that is education and will power,” he says.

Footnote: Anil is also the author, co-author, or co-editor of over 70 papers and three other books – The Quest for Global Dominance (Jossey-Bass/Wiley, 2008), Smart Globalization (Jossey-Bass/Wiley, 2003), and Global Strategy and Organization (John Wiley, 2003). Anil serves as a regular columnist for BusinessWeek. His opinion pieces have also been published in The Wall Street Journal, Financial Times, Chief Executive Magazine, The Daily Telegraph, China Daily, and Economic Times among others.

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