Davos 2019: Where Bain Capital Wants To Park Money In India
Bain Capital’s Steve Pagliuca thinks India is a “bright spot” at a time the U.S and European markets are facing growth pressures.
Bain Capital’s co-chairman Steve Pagliuca thinks India is a “bright spot” at a time the U.S and the European markets are facing growth challenges.
“It (India) continues to have a growth in excess of 7 percent. They have been a little immune from this (pressure) and benefited from the low oil prices,” he told BlombergQuint on the sidelines of the World Economic Forum 2019 in Davos, Switzerland.
As India gears up for the general election, he said, “One cannot be on the ‘sidelines’ but instead needs to be more selective about the companies that can be ‘transformed and grown’ with the right investment.”
There are still opportunities out there… It wouldn’t be a great year for playing vanilla and buying a plain vanilla company.Steve Pagliuca, Co-Chairman, Bain Capital
Pagliuca said India’s financial services sector is going in the right direction and it’s a good chance to invest. “When you step back, very good banks in India are growing quickly and the market needs more credit and so we think it is a wonderful opportunity.”
Bain Capital, which invested $3.5 billion in India, including its bets on Axis Banks Ltd. and L&T Finance Ltd., also finds the services, especially healthcare, “interesting”.
Pagliuca said the company’s strategy is to not to worry about the markets but focus more on the firms they seek to invest in. “We look opportunistically and strategically at all regions of the world. It doesn’t really matter what happens to the market. It is about the specific deal and how the company performs. We found plenty of those in India.”