India would flourish as an economy: Carlyle India Advisors

Excerpts from Bazaar on CNBC-TV18 Watch the full show » ALSO READ See what other FIIs are saying about the markets See what other experts are saying about markets See what Udayan Mukherjee is saying about the markets Nifty BSE | NSE 31/05/12 Are Mutual Funds betting on Nifty?

Q: Any specific sector focus that you bring out here because you have invested in fairly diverse companies in the past, anything like infrastructure or financials which are your trained focus areas in India?

A: We believe in two board things; one is the domestic consumption story which includes Fast Moving Consumer Goods (FMCG) companies, media and entertainment, domestic healthcare, cement and building products and the other outsourcing themes which may include engineering services, IT and IT enable services, generic pharma export, clinical research etc. We feel both these themes - you would see a lot of world class companies emerge out of India.

Q: How soon would you want to go about investing that cash because we sense that market sentiment has turned about quite a bit - is now a good time to be going about deploying money?

A: We are normally not very much affected by what happens in the market because we tend to take a five-seven year view. So what we are looking at is backing entrepreneurial people and looking at companies who would grow at 30-40-50% compounded annually over the next five years or so. I think India would flourish as an economy and we see a lot of opportunities as a result of that.    
Q: By when do you think you will be able to invest that more than USD 400 million into the Indian market, by what timeline?
A: It again depends on the quality of businesses we see, the valuation we reach. Carlyle is an outstanding platform, it's got great track record since 1987, our gross corporate internal rate of return (IRR) is around 34%, so we tend to be a bit conservative on valuation and we believe in backing world class managements.