'Global chaos relatively positive for India' - Rising middle class can drive consumer growth: BlackRock COO Goldstein
Goldstein, who first visited India in 2010, remains bullish on the country due to a combination of factors including digitisation, working age population and urbanisation. Excerpts from an interview:
Digitisation Drive
Rob: I am incredibly bullish on India. India has this unique position where a lot of the reshaping of the world order happens. One of the incredible things about India was that as a society, it skipped a bunch of steps in terms of its journey to digitisation and how the phone became your identity.
One of the reasons it was able to achieve that is because it didn't have a legacy that it needed to work through. And obviously, we're very privileged in terms of our partnership with Jio.
They were one of the key catalysts towards enabling that.
India & The World
A few years ago, we came out with five key themes that we felt were going to shape the future of economics, the global order, and most importantly asset returns and how people build portfolios.
Those were: global fragmentation and geopolitics; digital disruption and AI; the future of finance, which is the role of the capital markets - public and private - relative to the role of banks; demographic divergences and the transition to a low-carbon environment.
It's quite extraordinary if you look at these mega forces that are shaping or reshaping the world, and then you look at them through an India perspective.
At a time where most of the developed world is struggling with the fact that their workforces are shrinking, there is the concept of 'one in five working-age people will be in India...' It's a great case study in how technology enables financial inclusion. On the urbanisation front, there's not just the rising middle class and mass affluent demographic, but it also has the potential to drive consumer growth for decades to come.
And again, I think the new world that is being defined in many regards, India is increasingly becoming at the centre of that new world. And a lot of the global turbulence is a relative positive for India.
Mutual Fund Potential
The total mutual fund industry in India is roughly $800 billion. How could the world's fourth-largest economy have just that? It's a remarkable number that's out of proportion.. Here less than 10% of the wealth is in mutual funds, or the capital markets.
The majority of wealth is in cash deposits, real estate, and gold. There is an exceptional opportunity for that capital to be deployed in more efficient, productive ways that help create a growth flywheel for the country: the power of capital markets, the power of compounding, the power of investing over the long term, and what that could enable for people.
India is still very early in that journey. And that is what we aspire to help catalyse through Jio BlackRock.
On Jio BlackRock
In addition to transparent and competitive pricing, one of the benefits that BlackRock can bring to JioBlackRock is the use of Aladdin, which offers portfolio and risk management capabilities. When we talk about applying data driven investing at BlackRock, we are describing strategies that harness the power of AI to derive investment insights from signals based on broad sets of data. That includes structured, or traditional, data such as earnings or data on rates.
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