Ranbaxy and Dr Reddy's Laboratories led India's pharmaceutical industry into a new era, when they licenced the first products of their research to foreign companies. The rapidity and extent of change is captured on India's stock markets, where the list of India's top private sector companies by market capitalisation reveals the churning that has taken place. Industrial turmoil has shattered the monopoly on commercial wealth held by the great business dynasties of Bombay and Calcutta. N.R. Narayana Murthy of Infosys Technologies, Subhash Chandra of Zee Telefilms, Shiv Nadar of NIIT, Anji Reddy of Dr Reddy's, and Dhirubhai Ambani of Reliance Industries. Ratan Tata of Tata Sons, and Kumarmangalam Birla of Aditya Birla, India's two great industrial houses, are fighting to adapt their empires to competitive markets.
Many lesser dynasties are already at the brink of commercial extinction.
There will be big winners and big losers. We are seeing the emergence of a large number of companies that did not exist 10 years ago. Just because you were a power-house in the 1960s doesn't mean you are going to be around in the new millennium. From humble beginnings, Indian companies are migrating to high value software services, e-commerce, business consultancy and technology research. We have a more scaleable model because we have access to trained manpower.