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Standard Charterved is slated to hold the meeting of its global board in India this year. One can be forgiven for expecting it to generate news, given the sequence of events at the turn of the century. The bank's board came to India in 1992 and the next year, it announced the acquisition of Grindlays.
Not counting the East India Company's jamborees in the 17th century, StanChart was the first multinational to hold its global board's meeting in India, in the 1980s. ABB cam soon after, in 1991, after its chairman Percy Barnevik met Prime Minister Narasimha Rao in Davos.
The predilection has caught on -- French Cement giant LaFarge has come twice already - as more and more companies want to give a first-hand feel of the rising India to their top management.
"The whole idea of the board coming is that it gets a feel of India," says Ajay Khanna, the former managing director of India Brand Equity Fund.
For some, India has become critical to global operations. It accounts for 10 per cent of StanChart's top line as well as bottom.
Of its 50,000 global workforce, 15,000 is in India. (Peter Sands, who took charge as the bank's CEO on November 22, is coming in a week.)
Not surprisingly, the board meetings in India have often been around milestones.
Nokia is scheduled to open its first Indian mobile handset manufacturing plant in 2006. Siemens, at the meeting of its global board in India, announced an investment plan worth $500 million. Perot clinched two acquisitions. Deutsche, which held its senior management conference in New Delhi last year, entered the retail segment a year ago.
Harol Sirkin, Chicago-based senior vice-president of BCG, wrote in Businessweek soon after the India rendezvous: "We visited numerous companies, and at every stop we got the clear message that to equate India with call centres is to miss the real story."
But, for many, the meetings are not about India alone.
The Deutsche conference brought together over 200 senior managers from across the world to thrash out strategy -- global strategy -- over two days.
Says an MNC executive: "Five years back, it was a question of India or China and most chose China. Today, it is India and China. No one wants to give it a miss."
