The importance of India as a Growth Market

Growth Markets, those economies with GDP that account for more than 1% of global economic output, have rightly been described as “economic powerhouses”; they simply can’t be ignored, which is why the investment team at Red Ribbon Asset Management have a core principle that no portfolio can be considered properly balanced which doesn’t have at least 10% of its assets deployed in Growth Market Projects; and once deployed Red Ribbon’s Mainstream Impact Investment Strategies have a very real potential to act as a turbo charger for investor returns.

And India is the fastest growing large economy in the world so inevitably it has drawn attention over recent years as the most interesting of the Growth Markets, something of a bellwether for global economic change. That’s another reason why investment on the subcontinent is at the heart of Red Ribbon’s strategies, and it’s certainly not alone in thinking so.

Take Instagram for example.

Mike Krieger, co-founder and chief technology officer at Instagram, found himself with more than the odd dollar or two to spend when Instagram was bought by Facebook in 2012 for a cool $1 Billion. The company has more than 700 Million users worldwide of which roughly 5% (or 30 million) are located on the subcontinent. And that demographic is likely to become more significant still as India’s population is projected (by the United Nations) to be the biggest on the planet by 2020; added to which the subcontinent is also becoming more affluent, better able to buy into the hardware and infrastructure of the social network (as evidenced, of course, by this year’s Vodaphone acquisition).

None of that has been lost on Mike Krieger:

“India is a super interesting market for us. We think of India as one of our high growth markets. In 2012, when we decided to expand Instagram, our user base was about 50% from the US and the remaining from other geographies. Today, about 70% of our users are from outside the US and that will only be growing. Hence, we are looking at high-growth markets including India.”

It’s a good illustration of why India is rapidly becoming more important on the world economic stage: with a burgeoning population, faster growing ever more wealthy and creating an increasingly resilient domestic demand for everything from mobile phones to electric cars. It is a mix of socio economic factors that also illustrates an interesting investment dynamic all of its own.

Mainstream Impact Investment, the innovative investment strategy at the heart of Red Ribbon’s policies, is driven by precisely this kind of resilient, long-term economic dynamic; because growth of the kind being experienced in India at the moment is both central to and ultimately dependent on the wider society (linked intimately with factors such as population growth and average income) and that, in turn, is linked inevitably to a healthy environment. They are all interdependent. That’s why Red Ribbon is committed to pursuing Impact Investment Strategies in Growth Markets.

Read about Red Ribbon Asset Management here: https://redribbon.co/

Read about Instagram and India here; timesofindia.indiatimes.com/topic/Instagram

Read about Red Ribbon Fund Management here: https://redribbon.co/

Read about Mainstream Impact Investment here: reports.weforum.org/impact-investment/