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We have heard about the home of the richest man in Asia (displaced Jack Ma recently). Here it is, the Antilia in Mumbai. The home of Mukesk Ambani, chairman of Reliance Industries and has a staff strength of 600 just to maintain it.
If you think about strolling in the lobby to take a look, you can forget it. The securities are tight with securities and even a soldier with an armored truck standing guard outside. Can you imagine this is home to just one family? Probably one less resident since he just married off his daughter recently in a US$100M wedding that made news worldwide.
The wedding of Indians are quite a big deal. I was chatting with some local friends and it can easily cost $100-200k. Unlike the Chinese, most of these amount cannot be recouped. It is just ‘gone’.
Mumbai is really interesting as it is a city of contrast, a contrast between a rich and the poor. The inequality gap is huge here. The south of Mumbai looks nothing like the north. I find that the roads in the south are more well maintained and orderly than the north. Not to mention the quality and facade of the apartments that looks just like any other major cities in the first world.
I have always been fascinated by the slums in Dharavi (made famous after the movie Slumdog Millionaire) after watching a documentary about it. It is amazing that it has it’s own thriving mini economy or ecosystem. There about 600,000 people living in the slums and the annual turnover is over US$1 billion according to Wikipedia.
There is always organised chaos and the slums is no different. The streets might be dirty and poorly maintained but you can see order to this and things still works. Unfortunately we did not venture too far into the slums as our Indian friend (‘the privilege type’) is a little nervous.
India is going through some major changes and I am not referring to the politics. E-commerce is booming and there is a lot of investment going into the country with many data centers being built and more coming. The American internet giants are eyeing the $1.3b population and investing heavily into this country. Even the Chinese are getting into the act with their internet giants bringing their apps and games to the Indians. Many of the young and the brightest are starting their own companies hoping to be the next big thing like Flipkart. Flipkart was sold to Walmart recently making the two Indian co-founders $16 billion rich overnight. The Chinese is miles ahead of the Indians in e-commerce and internet but give them some time, the Indians will definitely catch-up with their IT savvy youth and a large middle class. The Indian technology sector is again something to watch out for.
It wasn’t too long ago that the internet speed in India was pathetic. All these changed with the entrance of Reliance Jio into the picture. With their disruptive mobile service offer, they changed a voice hungry country to a data hungry country. They went from zero subscriber to more than 200 Million subscribers today and growing. This has caused great distress to the rest of the mobile companies. In order to catch-up, they started to also provide higher internet speeds. These are very important changes to this country as it has significant ripple effects to the economy. With better technological infrastructure such as higher internet speed, it is an enabler to other innovative apps and related ecosystems to grow in this country. I feel that in terms of technology, things are changing fast and disruption is also coming to India as it already has to other countries. Embracing technology is generally a good thing but for country like India with many living below the poverty line, I am less certain. There is huge number of small businesses in the Indian economy but if they are unable to compete with the e-commerce giants and find themselves cut off from the action, it could spell disaster politically. Well, boom or bane nobody knows and only time will tell.
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