There has been much debate on Piyush Goyal’s comments asking Indian startups to innovate more like their Chinese counterparts, but Paytm CEO Vijay Shekhar Sharma has an interesting take on the issue.
Paytm CEO Vijay Shekhar Sharma has said that China is ahead of India and other countries in deep tech industries because it had the foresight to start working on these technologies before they were mainstream. “Did you see the India vs China post,” he asked at a session at the Startup Mahakumbh. “I was in China in 2014-15, and I learnt that they’d vowed to win the global Electric Vehicles war back then,” he said.
“EVs? They aren’t all that popular. Will there be a demand for them?” Sharma remembered thinking at the time.
“I’d also met Elon Musk around 2012. I was a little confused back then, that at a time when the world was adopting mobile internet, why were Elon Musk and China talking about electric vehicles?” he said.
Sharma said that it was this focus on futuristic technologies — which weren’t popular at the time — that’s enabled China to now have a leadership position in these fields. “Developed ecosystems like China and the US are able to play in the longer term,” he said. “It’s like when you’re in Class 6 or 7, and you start thinking about your IIT preparation. So when you’re mature, when you have resources, you can play a longer arc game,” he added.
“This is a sequencing of maturities. Today India is addressing its current opportunities. The money that comes from these opportunities will help us expand and address the next level of opportunities, which are longer-term. In China, they were working on things in 2010 that we’re working on here in India in 2025,” he said.
It’s an astute point. China had a long term vision with EVs, and over a decade ago had planned to control all aspects of the industry — it had acquired mines in African nations to be able to get the raw materials for batteries, it had invested heavily in battery technology that powers EVs, and it had worked on building the vehicles themselves. All this has meant that China is now the world leader in EVs, and BYD is outselling even Tesla around the globe. It remains to be seen if India too can develop long-term plans like this, but it appears that it’ll take a join effort between the government and the startup ecosystem to get there.