Cobra’s Karan Bilimoria on beer, entrepreneurship and trade between the UK and India

Source: Exec Digital UK

Date :08/01/2008 09:11:04

In an exclusive interview with Exec, Lord Bilimoria, founder of Cobra Beer and Chairman of the UK India Business Partnership explains how he is launching the Cobra brand in the dominant Indian market.

Up until now Cobra has established itself principally in the UK, Europe and North America. It is on the brink of cracking the really big market, though, which is India itself.

Cobra Beer has already enjoyed phenomenal success, having grown at an annual growth rate of 40 percent over the 17 years of its existence. It now has an annual turnover of about £100 million. The strategic target is to grow that to $1 billion by 2014.

“The economy of India is growing at nine percent a year. The beer market there grew at 27 percent last year and within that, we are growing, admittedly from a small base, at literally hundreds of percent per annum,” he said.

“We are the fastest growing brand in the fastest growing beer market in the world. We have hit critical mass in India and I think that is going to continue for some years, so in fact I would hope to reach that billion dollar mark much quicker than 2014.”

Indian economy

India is going to dominate world economics and we’d better get used to that.

“The whole world has opened up to ‘opportunity India’, and India’s growth rate is not a flash in the pan; this is sustained growth which is forecast to continue by all the major economic institutions, including Goldman Sachs which predicts that India’s growth rate will be an average eight percent over the next decade at least,” Karan explains.

“Probably by 2050, India will overtake the United States and become alongside China one of the two largest economies in the world.”

UK India Business Council

As Chairman of the UK India Business Council (UKIBC) Karan leads for British business in maintaining our historic political links with this massive economy; our ties of language; our common business, law and accountancy practices; not to mention our shared military and trading partnership to ensure that Britain plays a full share in this growth.

Karan says: “There’s a consumer market of over 300 million people in India today, and the population is growing at a rate of 15 million people a year, equivalent to the population of the Netherlands, so the opportunity for British business in India is absolutely tremendous.”

“Of course Indian companies are listing more and more on the London Stock Exchange, both on the main list and AIM. Indian companies are acquiring British companies on a massive scale like the $10 billion deal between Tata and Corus, and UK companies are acquiring Indian companies too in the way that Vodafone just acquired Hutch in India, another $10 billion deal. And that’s only just beginning…

January 08, 2008

To read the full interview, click here