This year, the timing of the Diwali festivities coincides with All Saints Day. The Indian festival is all about light overtaking darkness or knowledge overtaking ignorance. Let's see how that pans out in about a week's time.
The Christian All Saints Day is rather about looking backwards, something at which Europeans are fairly adept.
As it happens, only a tiny number of European listed companies are straddling the light and growth of India with their know how. Ten years after the beginning of Modi’s reign, it is shocking to see how few European issuers have gone for the Indian growth proposition, with the herd having chosen to pile into China instead, only to be consistently trashed by the Chinese counterparts.
The recently (2024) launched Federation of European Business in India (Febi) is tellingly short of any freely-accessible figures about the connections between India and Europe.
Looking at the AlphaValue country exposure data sets, only 12 corporates even bother to mention their (minimal) exposure to India. As usual, the exposure of other stocks, where it exists, is booked under a wider regional definition (say Southern Asia) as if India was not big enough.
We then expanded that list to firms with likely exposure, a significant asset (say Vodafone’s Idea) or a JV of some design (say TotalEnergies' very large JVs with Adani). It is certainly a very empirical effort. We find 37 European firms with Indian exposure using AlphaValue’s vast proprietary database and a bit of AI. Back in 2013 when AlphaValue started investigating India as a growth proposition, this number was limited to 13. Obviously, so as to be relevant, this observation is made across the same coverage universe.
This acceleration in cross-continent connections is excellent news. Shame that European issuers have been so reluctant to highlight it. Hopefully they are buying into a country which has retained proper functioning courts and Parliament, meaning that business may not be trapped as it has been in China. The 37-strong compilation is actually quite an exhaustive exercise which is available to clients on request.