'India is our top performing market in the world': Blackstone CEO Stephen Schwarzman

India is the top performing market for the US private equity group Blackstone, its CEO Stephen Schwarzman said in an exclusive interview with Moneycontrol.

"When we decided to come here in 2005, we announced that we will put $1 billion here. People have probably forgotten that 20 years ago, it was a huge number. We were on the front pages of all the newspapers. Now, we are many times of what we expected to be. This is because the country is such a great place to operate," he told Network18's Group Consulting Editor Bodhisatva Ganguli in Mumbai.

Schwarzman said Blackstone aims to double its total exposure in India to $100 billion in the future. "We spend our time building businesses in India, to make India better…We are rapidly growing in India. We are the largest foreign company in the country. We are the largest private equity firm here," he said. Schwarzman added that the alternative investment management company considered it great to operate in India. "We are very bullish on the future of the country," he added.

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Speaking about the recent downturn in the stock market, Schwarzman said that the company has seen several such cycles. "We look at the fundamentals in the country. It has excellent stability and political leadership. Regulations have gone down from where we had started. India has a very vigorous population, full of young people. There is a preference of technology. So we are very positive on the country. It is great to be back," he further said.

Schwarzman noted that it "was pretty difficult for a foreigner" to do business in India, 20 years ago. "We have had some investments here which didn’t work out. What we did was that we learnt how to work here. The country changed as well," he said.

During its time in India, Blackstone realised that it was better off owning businesses and leading its direction, instead of simply owning some stake in them, Schwarzman said. "It's not what we do in other places in the world. We defaulted to what we are comfortable doing. If you control assets, things grow quite well here in India," he added.

Also read: We are rapidly growing in India, says Blackstone CEO Stephen Schwarzman | Full text of Q&A