India Over 2020-2030 Presents Once in a Lifetime Opportunity for Wealth Creation, But for Those Who See it Through The Right Lens

Speakers: Anup Maheshwari | CIO & Joint CEO, IIFL Asset Management; Dinshaw Irani | CIO, Helios India, Navin Agarwal, MD & CEO, Motilal Oswal Asset Management Company and Vikas Khemani | Founder, Carnelian Capital
Moderator: Lakshmi Iyer
Date & Time: 6^th Feb 2021; 11:30 AM to 12:20 PM

With a lot of alphabets in the news, we guess the final verdict is that India will witness a V-shaped recovery. This decade begins with a year of hope, the year of vaccines and we (India) are now running well ahead than what we started off the pandemic with.

As rightly explained by Mr. Navin Agarwal, the last decade (compounded for 10 years) was of about 5% annual nominal returns with respect to Nifty; the next decade should witness a growth. Mr. Vikas Khemani seconded this comment by explaining how Covid, though an unfortunate event for humanity, has unleashed massive economic opportunities for India— Covid has helped open up a lot of arenas, thus providing once in a lifetime opportunity for wealth creation.

Mr. Anup asserted that the decade definitely began with people changing their perception towards health, government’s perception for the economy has changed and thus impetus has been provided for, corporates’ perceptions have also included flexibility leading to things improving “dramatically” and technology has become the need of the hour. Mr. Dinshaw extrapolated this statement and was affirmative of the fact that technology will rule the coming decade and “Green” will be the colour of the decade as a cleaner and more and more renewable friendly technology come in.

For the year ending March 2022, we are looking at Rs 25 lakh crores of addition to GDP—this is adding $3 trillion in GDP. India is now headed towards a phase where the consumption cycle is improving, and the investment cycle is finally getting support from the government. The fact that the financial sector, despite being put under so many stress-tests, has come out spectacularly. This shows that the economy is poised to grow and grow dramatically over the next decade.

But the fact that bond yields have been rising, investors often worry whether this will be play “party pooper” to the equity momentum? Expressing a certain level of assertiveness  Mr. Prashant Khemani explains why and how India will soon become a current account surplus country, thus making regulators able to manage lower interest rates, along with managing the liquidity cycle.

The broad takeaways of this session were: do not underestimate the power of Indian Macros, the GDP growth is real—we are seeing momentum indicators, always have a diversified portfolio – lots of Equity, parts of Fixed Income and a pinch of Gold as well, and have offshore equities as well (as the currency depreciates).

All in all, with 3 members of the session being B-positive by blood, and all being be positive by nature, the bottom line is that everyone is optimistic—bullish on India and they see a sea of opportunities coming in for wealth creation.