There cannot be more Yin and Yang then India and China

My recent trip to China after a pause of nearly two years made me contemplate and mull over to write this into my diary. Some amount of reading on China blended with hearing to perspectives of a few leaders during the NASSCOM trip where in I did present on the topic related to Manufacturing and IT. I have also linked my presentation on this topic.
When I was reading on Google, I came across this interesting piece about India and China, Nathu La pass re-opening in 2012 after nearly 44 years of closure, while can be considered symbolic it only goes towards furthering the argument the two giants are bound to work together as the foundations on which they stand are more complimentary then one can imagine. The business velocity is only going up exponentially with the expectation that by 2016 nearly 40% of the world trade to be controlled by the largest (China) and third Largest (India). This takes us back to the 1800’s when nearly half of the Globe’s trade was driven by the two.
With most Multinational’s lamenting about either lack of success or slow speed of business in both India and China , they obviously continue to be present despite all the complexities mainly due to the lure of the vast population and the humongous size of the market. Now are they investing enough to reap benefits ? That would be a million dollar question? This will obviously vary from industry to industry and will require deep strategic thinking, capital, and innovation to meet local value and price points leveraging local ecosystems etc before they expect any returns. Will the same shoe fit both the emerging markets, surely not? In more than a decade of experience with China, sharing a few thoughts through this note of mine.
10 years since I first visited China to my recent trip to China, what has changed? I still do recollect during my first visit, I had an opportunity to have a fairly long discussion with a very deep strategic thinker Shiv Shankar Menon the current National adviser to the Indian Government, who was then India’s ambassador to China. His eagerness to support an Indian company setting foot in China, was very evident as I am sure he saw the amount of interest the Chinese were expressing to get into Indian market and we obviously have seen the position they have reached in India by literally dumping Chinese manufactured goods at price points which will be very tough for any of the domestic companies to match upto. Balance of trade heavily tilted in China’s favour with them dumping into India. Menon surely wanted to see India in a similar position leveraging our Supremacy in Software .
In contrast to that , while Indian Software Giants entered China with a lot of Fanfare , many of us thought we could leverage the talent in China, some of us thought we would follow our Global customers into china and very few of us thought let us go after the Domestic market in China . While all these thoughts would have been considered radical in those days. I do not think any of the companies have achieved even 1/10th of what they intended to do. It can be argued that many of us have invested a pittance in China to achieve the above objective, another school of thought would be why Should we?

In the context of the status of the Indian IT industry, if we are seeing better returns for the dollar invested in other markets and in the shortest time frame why would we want to waste our energy efforts and capital by going after the China Market. China undoubtedly will be the most difficult market to address on all counts. While we can show statistics of the availability of software manpower there usability in markets outside China is pathetically poor. The amount of training and management time investments we would need to make is humongous to even bring them to the base levels.
Added to that would be the cautious approach any company would like to take in the current context of the global economic climate. In the past decade we have been used to hearing about the Supremacy of Chinese economic climate , that surely is over now and is surrounded with the fears of the implosion and the turmoil’s they are going through internally .
While there could be a few Global Multinationals have started seeing modest returns in manufacturing investments but none would be leveraging China for building either intellectual property or anything to do with core R&D. All of us know the reasons and that is not going to change any time in the near future.
Also in addressing the domestic markets most of them or nearly all of them have failed miserably as Chinese as a race will never trust another and they do believe as a nation they can do it all and they have the resources and money now to conquer the world. Why would they want to actually develop anyone else at best they would like to plug the gaps by buying what they do not have? Also for a moment if we were to leave aside the above perspective, and we go about forging partnerships with local companies to address the domestic Chinese market , for sure Chinese partner will be one of the toughest race to negotiate and the fundamental premise we should build on needs to be “cross leverage” .
In Conclusion with the above context, while without doubt there cannot be more Yin and Yang then India and China, as both have inherent strengths and if both of us need to prosper the only way out is “ Cross Leverage “ and negotiate to reach a win – win .
At a Government level, Indian IT Industry surely has the Software supremacy to command respect and also use the same as major leverage in bilateral negotiations to get the Chinese Government to concede with favorable terms for other industries where we are challenged. Also in sticky territories like manpower movement, movement of capital between countries we will need to more firms insist on concessions which will make our software industry consider investing more.
At a Company level , we should be negotiating with the Government bodies in China and get them to invest more in terms of capital so that we can assist in building up their industry . Earlier in the last decade the investments have been coming fairly aggressively from the Chinese government in terms of training grants , real estate subsidies etc. We should expect and get them to give a lot more in terms of giving boot strap commercial projects which we could help in executing along with their local companies and manpower and our Superior project / program management which would come at a premium price.
At a Individual level, just like the Chinese exhibit enormous hunger to learn, learn and learn. Many of us who have already invested in our carriers in China or have ambitions to do so, the only way would be to be ahead in the race by equipping ourselves to the next level so that we can manage and command the Chinese resources 