Whilst the rest of Australia looks to China for an expansion of trade opportunities, one group of businessmen is mounting a unique business delegation to India
With Australia’s major trade partners grappling with slowing economies, Australian businesses need to urgently wake up to the Indian opportunity.
It is for this reason that an intrepid group of Australian entrepreneurs is embarking on a trip to India in October 2015 to assess if and how they can sell their products and services there. The delegation is organized by The Indus Entrepreneurs or TiE (www.melbourne.tie.org), one of the largest networks of entrepreneurs in the world dedicated to fostering entrepreneurship. TiE is grounded in the ethos of unselfishly giving back. It has a large voluntary corps of successful entrepreneurs who mentor aspiring or start-up entrepreneurs.
“TiE s a global network with a particularly strong base in India and the silicon Valley. And so we thought it would be powerful to combine this strength with the mentoring ethos, and look at helping Australian businesses make good connections in India and then provide ongoing mentoring to help them establish a presence there,” says Rod Smith, President of TiE Melbourne.
India is the seventh largest economy in the world (third by purchasing power parity), but growing rapidly at 8 % per annum, and set to become the third largest after China and USA by 2050.
“I was keen to expand my business into India given the growing numbers of skilled people entering the workforce there, who could really benefit from the sorts of services we provide. I sought out TiE
In Melbourne, and I am genuinely impressed by how much they helped me,” says Dale Simpson’s Bravo Consulting runs coaching, leadership development and career management programs. He set up operations in India in 2009 with help from TiE.
About 300 million Indians (60m Indian households) are already in the middle class, estimated to increase to over 500 million by 2025. But Indo‐Australian trade in 2014 was only $15.9b, one-tenth of the China-Australia trade. Australia is China’s seventh largest trading partner but does not make it into even the top 20 list of India’s trading partners. Recognising the ground-breaking nature of this visit, TiE’s Indian chapters have joined the party.
The Australian group has been invited to TiECon Delhi, one of the largest conferences of entrepreneurs in the world, with around 2,500 delegates attending.
And the TiE chapters in Mumbai and Bangalore are organizing special gatherings of their members for the group to meet.
“We invite any Australian entrepreneur, large or small, who has ever wondered about India, to come along and make full use of this rare opportunity,” says Smith.
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