THE chief executive officers of Google, IBM and Microsoft are Sundar Pichai, Arvind Krishna and Satya Nadella. As of July 29, 2020, the market capitalizations of Infosys, Wipro Ltd. and Tech Mahindra are $54.7 billion, $23.3 billion and $8.7 billion, respectively.

Why are the CEOs of three of the most storied companies in global technology Indian and why are so many multibillion-dollar market cap tech companies from India? For the latter, please don’t be stupid or racist enough to say cheap labor. Hundreds of countries have cheap labor. To the former, please don’t also be stupid enough to say, well, it has population of over a billion. Well, so does China and if we aggregated some countries together, they would have a similar total population and not one CEO of a global tech company comes from them, though China is probably next in line and also has at least as many very valuable homegrown tech companies of which Alibaba and Tencent are only the most prominent.

Premium + Digital Edition

Ad-free access


P 80 per month
(billed annually at P 960)
  • Unlimited ad-free access to website articles
  • Limited offer: Subscribe today and get digital edition access for free (accessible with up to 3 devices)

TRY FREE FOR 14 DAYS
See details
See details