The Vibrant Gujarat Global Summit has paved the way for multinational companies to integrate India in their global supply chain. Leaders of some of the top companies and country delegations were part of the summit to reinforce the significance of their bilateral trade and explore opportunities for accelerating investment in India.
Here are a few interviews of the industry experts and entrepreneurs:
Dominik Dys, Export Director, BakomaBakoma is one of the biggest dairy producer in Poland, manufacturing rape seed oil and other agriculture products. Yearly, Bakoma buys 1 million tonnes of different kinds of cereals to process all the products.
Why Gujarat: Gujarat is a well-developed and active state in India. Gujarat has a big potential for cooperation and is mainly into agri-food business. The first step is the general agreement of co-operation in different areas and new projects. We have signed this in an MOU with Amul India for the dairy sector, feed stuff for animals – high protein commodities for cattle and farming. We have started with Gujarat first and would plan to move to other states.
Performance in 2016: We had raising tendencies though a few percent. The holding had a yearly turnover of about more than 1 billion dollar in 2016. For 2017, we want to grow and continue this growth in India, especially Gujarat. We want to focus on Amul India first and will then move to other companies in India.
Nilaya Verma, Leader for Government & Healthcare Practice, KPMG IndiaOn GST: GST is one piece of reform that industry has been asking for a long time. Apart from the direct impact to GDP, it brings in long term sustainable growth. There is a lot of contribution that work that KPMG can do from impact on businesses and state government to all the way to help out rollout processes systems IT Systems. We have been involved with over 100 companies in India and looked at the impact of GST into their businesses. Globally, we have a strong GST consulting group. We are well entrenched and engaged as far as GST is concerned for the government. This could have happened sometime back but it’s good that it’s happening now.
On Demonetisation: I meet a lot of investors during my travel. From an investment and trade perspective, for investor and businessmen, it is a perception that India is very serious about tackling corruption and which is holding it back as far as large investments are concerned. From an investment perspective, this is a positive move. There are certain challenges that we are facing but what it can potentially bring in is just a small price to pay.
On Startup India: According to the Prime Minister, India needs to be the employment provider rather than takers and also consumption we have, India has huge amount of potential for startups. Our government has taken startup policy along with a number of programmes. With the increasing startup culture, one aspect needs to be ingrained and that is acceptance of failure. As a society, we need to accept failures and for an industry like startup it is bound to have failures and in my view the fear of failure is holding back India from being a startup country. This needs to be addressed more from the cultural aspect besides the hard aspects of money, no regulation for startup, tax related challenges, etc. KPMG is proud to be associated with the government of India on many programmes. We worked as advisors to support IPP in the development of startup action plan. The revised regime has increased number of applications and there are a lot of programmes being implemented under this plan.
BW Reporters
Vaishali Dar is a Senior Associate Editor with BW Businessworld and Editorial Head with BW Disrupt. She writes on corporates, start-ups, hospitality and travel
