India is buzzing. Its $1000bn economy is expected to double in size in the next five to six years and its order books are positively bulging. In the first 10 months of 2007, companies received orders worth Rs1281bn ($32.6bn), up by 68% on the same period last year. In its fifth year of strong gross domestic product (GDP) growth, India has a real GDP growth of more than 8% per year. It has 190 companies with a market capitalisation exceeding $1bn and 30 valued at more than $10bn.
Foreign direct investment (FDI) has more than doubled in the last 12 months: as 2007 drew to a close it had reached $19.4bn, versus $7.7bn in 2006. But India’s growing confidence and global ambitions have also led to increasing flows of outward FDI, which had risen to almost $10bn by the end of 2006, up from $2.5bn in 2005.
