The last quarter of the year is the season of the returning Indian diaspora; the weather starts getting better on the subcontinent just as it starts to get colder elsewhere. Weddings abound, reunions are planned, and the social calendar is brimming with festivities. Many of the said wayfarers transit through Mumbai, and if one is an equity analyst and enterprising enough, the local sales team can organise a roadshow for these global researchers with domestic clients. A company-paid business-class ticket is quite the bargain for spending a day shooting the breeze in Lower Parel and BKC.
Under the aforesaid scheme, Bertie was offered a joint meeting with a global commodity and a global hardware analyst—let’s call them Mr Copper and Mr Chips. Having to contend with two accents, two alphabet soups, and bipolar valuations, Bertie’s mental processing unit began to sputter. He said as much to the chaperoning salesperson who, unlike Bertie, seemed to be conserving his processing energy by watching Orry reels. Irritated, he looked up and, in a rasping school principal’s voice, asked Copper and Chips to speak only one at a time. In order to drive home the point, he looked at his expensive watch and allocated 20 minutes to each before declaring that they had a hard stop—probably to ensure they did not miss happy hour at the pub.
A semblance of order was thus , and Mr Copper flipped open his deck. Now, Bertie had seen these commodity demand-and-supply charts for over two decades. That familiarity kicked his processing unit back into gear, and he quickly grasped the main of the dissertation. Mr Copper then talked about the growing trend of “resource nationalisation,” wherein many commodity-exporting countries had either decreed export bans on critical materials or were mandating local processing of raw materials before export.
Resource nationalism
Bertie pronounced the policy sensible and apropos of the times. Since it is an unsaid rule in such meetings that the client makes the closing comment, Bertie put on his CNBC voice and said, “The most valuable resources of a country should not be made available unfettered to everyone else.”
Since the allocated 20 minutes for Mr Copper were up, Bertie turned to Mr Chips. Unlike Mr Copper, he did not flip open his slide deck but instead said, “You make an interesting point.” Bertie found that surprising because it meant he was actually listening to the prior conversation. Not only that—he had understood it and was about to add his opinion on the matter. Bertie will not deny that this mildly amused him, and he looked at Mr Chips expectantly.
Mr Chips was choosing his words. “If a country’s most precious resources should not be made available on a platter, then why do you think India is doing it?” Bertie looked confused but assumed that since Mr Chips might not know a lot about the world of commodities, he would have to educate him. “India does not export a lot of commodities, Mr Chips,” he said. “In fact, we import many of them, and exporters imposing restrictions raises costs for us.”
“I am not talking about minerals, Bertie,” Mr Chips said. “I am talking about people—the very best in the world.”
Precious manpower
paused, blinking. “Why are you letting other countries have free access to them?” Bertie looked confused for a second time in under a minute. Mr Chips realized that he needed to elucidate. “Twenty per cent of the world’s semiconductor design engineers are Indians. Maybe a third of Silicon Valley’s AI and ML researchers are Indian or of Indian origin. Add to that the number of Indians working in global capability centres for technology giants.”
Bertie nodded slowly, the penny dropping.
“Why is that happening?” Mr Chips pressed on. “Can India not provide capital to these engineers to work here? Can global money not fund their talent locally?” Bertie had no immediate rejoinder, and Mr Chips realized that. He now flipped open his deck—but for the next 20 minutes, Bertie was only thinking about the question that Mr Chips had posed.
Bertie is a Mumbai-based fund manager whose compliance department wishes him to cough twice before speaking and then decide not to say it after all.