Yesterday morning, I went to a breakfast seminar in the Technology Park where the topic, to a group of Finns, was the possibility of investing in India.
The main talk was by an Oulu old timer, Seppo Keränen who presently heads the Indian operations of FinPro. He talked about the demographics and how Finpro has been helping Finns find their feet in India.
There were a couple of gross errors in his presentation. He said that Wartsilä was the first company to set up production operations in India. He obviously does not know that Airam Oy started a bulb factory way back in the 70s which went bankrupt for reasons of poor understanding of the Indian business environment. Already before we left India, Annikki was translating the drawings and documents from Finnish to English when the plant was handed over to an Indian group.
Also, Seppo had no idea of the failed consultancy project of Jaakko Pyöry in the late 70s when I helped extricate them from a horrible mess in Bhadravati!
On the whole, he quoted some interesting figures and statistics. But in India things are happening so fast these days that even before the first figures are released, they are out of date.
Pasi Vaara, the Director of Wireless Solutions, which is part of the Indian multinational, Wipro Technologies, spoke about being part of an Indian company. A short but quite useful presentation about how a professional Indian company works. This was followed by a talk by Juho Eväsoja, CRO of Systems Biology Worldwide Ltd., from Helsinki who is heading the operations of a joint group on the research and development of drugs.
Seppo Keränen was highlighting the benefits of Finnish companies moving to India, while the other two speakers were focused on the benefits of being linked to Indian companies.
However, the questions from the floor seemed to highlight a completely different picture. It was almost as if the Finnish companies were looking for a knight in shining armour loaded with lots of cash coming to their rescue in this tough world called globalisation!
There were a couple of questions about how one could get going in India. The answers were too shallow, showing a lack of experience or knowledge about what Indian industry is all about. The reverse outsourcing being done by major Indian companies hardly got a mention.
For instance a serious philosophical question would be how would a Finnish company going to india avoid following in the footsteps of the "Union Carbide debacle in Bhopal"!
Having had 23 years of experience in arranging collaborations between the academia and businesses in India with Finnish counterparts, the whole attempt of this breakfast meeting left me totally wanting in getting answers to serious questions.
I did make one comment in that I drew attention to Professor Ajeet Mathur's latest publication which assesses the potential for trade between these countries which has been addressed in an earlier blog entry in our alma mater blogs.
Title : Finland-India Business Prospects 2007-2017
Author : Mathur Ajeet N.
Working Paper No. : 2007-03-01
Abstract
Finland-India Economic Relations were researched for the first time in a study that analysed mutual trade and investment potential through the lens of revealed comparative advantage and identified profitably tradable goods at 4-digit and 8-digit disaggregated levels in the standard international trade classification (Mathur, 1998). This study was made freely available on the world wide web for five years through http:// www.uta.fi/kati as part of longitudinal action research to study how small and large players would take advantage of this freebie. This paper provides initial results of a sequel study initiated in 2005 to understand what happened thereafter, whether trade grew, and to analyse how trade could diversify from identification of new opportunities for product-services linkages after the expiry of the transitional period that brought GATS into effect in 2005. Finland's share in Indian imports and exports has grown rapidly and exponentially and the prospects are vast but the potential realised by 2007 remains considerably untapped and far below comparable figures for other EU countries. This study emphasises the need for policy research on institutional barriers to design new gateways beyond an increased frequency of contact between people from the two countries. The conclusion that robust bridges could be built through tripartite fora comprising business, government and academia points to the need for new institutionalities and deepening research studies, some of which initiated as part of the Finland-India Economic Relations project, are at various stages of progress and expected to be completed during 2007-2010
I was amazed to see that no one had heard of his earlier publication in 1998 which was published by the major Finnish organisation, ETLA. This was published when Prof. Mathur was Professor at Tampere Universuty.
I do wish Finnish organisations will look to get expert advice from people who have long term experience in both countries, rather than allowing the blind to lead the blind, which is what Finns normally do when both are blind! ;-)
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