Big Deal: Warburg Pincus view on India and logistics business

Speaking about India, he said: “The macro environment here I would say is mixed, but the opportunities for India and the reason I think it is interesting is your point about global growth; global growth is challenged. India has that opportunity to have a multi-decade growth run and really when you look at it couple of decades down the road, be one of those economies that can be the next 10 trillion economy globally, it is possible. Is it preordained? Not at all. Is it a lot of things that have to happen between now and then? Yes. Policy, government all the things but we remain at Warburg Pincus optimistic that India will get there and we would like to be part of it.”

Talking about acquisitions, Anshuman Singh said: “The businesses that we are in the Stellar Value Chain out of the 160 billion market going up to 250 billion in the next two years the businesses that Stellar is in all those are high entry barrier business. For example contract logistics require infrastructures, scale, automation and more than everything a deep knowledge of it which we have. On the express side you have to build a network pan -India and that takes years. That has what brought in the acquisition strategy, we said to save time, and since GST has already arrived, e-way bills are already settled, this is the time to scale up fast on that entire value chain. That is why we did three acquisitions.”

He further added, “For the perishable goods, we did Kelvin Cold Chain Logistics. For the express transportation we did the acquisition of Innovative Logistics last year and now we did Patel Roadways, which is a 60-year-old company which has 350 branches built over 60 years, penetrating the whole country. It fits very well into our end-to-end value chain transformation ability for our customers.”