MEGA EXCLUSIVE: Mukesh Ambani & Larry Fink INTERVIEW | Investing For A New Era | JioBlackRock Event

Larry Fink
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JioBlackRock Event | Mukesh Ambani, and Larry Fink, Chairman and CEO of BlackRock, come together for a fireside chat—two leaders, one conversation shaping what’s next.
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The chairman of Reliance Industries, Mr Mukesh Ambani, and the chairman and CEO of BlackRock,
Larry Fink, to please join us on stage. Ladies and gentlemen, a big round of applause
in a conversation on what it will take to invest in a new era,
the trends that will shape our investment choices.
Mr Ambani, Larry Fink, thank you very much and welcome to a warm, sultry Mumbai from a very cold
Davos, Larry Fink, where you were in the throes of conversation with world leaders about the world
order or the world disorders. So let's get started with that. We're talking about investing in a new
era. What are the changes that you foresee that will shape the investment choices, the investment
decisions of leaders like you as we look at this new era? Well, first of all, it's great to be here
in Mumbai. It's great to spend time with my partner, Mukesh, and the entire Reliance NGO team.
So it's a real honor to be here. The weather is nicer here than it is in Davos and much nicer
than New York where I had our board meeting last week. So it's good to be here.
You know, we talk about a new era to give people a foundational understanding where we are.
But as an investor, I don't look at any era. I mean, our job is to be having people focus on
the real opportunities to invest over a lifetime. There's so much information that confuses people.
Media talks about the moment, the velocity of money. And the reality is, for most people,
they need to be in a position to grow with each and everyone's country.
So when you think about the growth of India, it's not a quarter. It's not a day or a week.
It's not a year. It's over a long horizon. And you could say maybe this is the era for India
over the next 20, 25 years. But if you use that as a foundational paradigm that we all want to
think about, the era of India, forget about the era of investing for a second, but the era of
India, the key for us, the key for GeoBlackRock is to compel more people to understand what does
that mean, the era of India, and how do you participate in it? What we've learned in the
United States, for that segment of the population that had invested with the growth of America,
they're far better off than those who just kept all their money in a bank account.
And so the key is, if you believe in the era of India, forget about the era of investment,
the era of India, which I believe in, we need to get more people investing alongside the growth of
the country. And that's the role of the capital markets. That's the role of what we can be doing
together. And to me, whether you want to focus on AI, you want to focus on how we live, how we grow,
how we educate ourselves, to me, those are subsets of the era of India, and the opportunity
to be an investor alongside the growth of India. And to me, that's a compelling story. It's not
about, you know, about terrorists or President Trump or anything else that's top of mind.
We need to be compelling people to think about the horizon of investing over a long period of time,
to grow with the great companies of India, to be a part of that, and to participate in that.
And I'm absolutely convinced, if you believe in that, in the era of India, we need to compel
hundreds of millions of Indians to invest alongside the growth of India.
And that will actually transform India in so many ways, because as more and more families
invest alongside the growth of India, India has less needs for the importation of capital. And I
do believe the combination of importation of capital from foreign investors who believe in
the era of India, but the fundamental foundation of any country is having the domestic economy being
built on the back of retirement savings, on the back of excess savings, to invest alongside of
that. Well, thank you very much for those opening remarks. And, you know, the era of India,
says Larry Frink, that is certainly going to be one of the headlines that goes out this evening.
But if I could ask you to explain to us, what excites you the most about India? You referenced
the tariffs and, you know, we've had a deal with the US overnight, President Trump and Prime
Minister Modi have signed off on that reciprocal tariff agreement. So the overhang has lifted at
least on one aspect of that relationship. How crucial a development is that? And what excites
you the most about India today? Well, let's be clear, over 20 years, it had no bearing.
Maybe over the next six months or a year, it had some significant bearing. But over time,
the foundational issues of India, how it's able to leapfrog, I mean, you watch what has,
over the last, I would say, since the era of the smartphone. And I think that's a pivotal point.
I mean, think about your life before the smartphone here in India. But the beginning of
the smartphone, the rollout of 5G, and how that transformed India in so many ways. When you think
about how the Modi administration digitized the rupee, and how it transformed commerce in India
across the board. I am very worried about other countries, even the United States is falling
behind. We need to be digitizing, we need to be thinking about how this all plays out. I think
this is part of the democratization of India. And so now India is a leader in this.
And so I can cite many things that give me optimism, but the fundamental opportunity is
the huge intellectualism of India, the transform, what technology, whether the technology was
created in the US or somewhere else in the world. The dispersion of that technology in India
is really what is so inspiring. And the utilization of the new technology for more and
more people, and how that transforms commerce, consumption, information, education, all of that
is ripe for real solid growth. And I agree that India has, over the next 10 plus years, it's going
to grow anywhere from 8% to 12%, probably hovering around 8% to 10%. And that's a place where I want
to personally invest in. And what we need to do is compelling more Indians to invest alongside
that growth. Well, we certainly hope that more Indians are going to be investing in that story
as well. And speaking of one such Indian, Mr. Ambani, let me talk to you about Larry Frink's
phrase of saying that this is the era of India. Now you've seen India over the last two decades
transform itself in many, many ways, especially as far as the digitization era is concerned.
Specifically, what excites you? What is compelling about the India story today?
How have you seen it being transformed? Well, Shireen, before I answer that, let me warmly
welcome Larry. And I'm grateful to Larry to again come back to India. It was a conversation that
we had in 23. And it just took me five minutes to say, Larry, BlackRock should be back in India.
And he said- That's all it took, five minutes?
Will you partner me? I think it was less.
It was a car ride. We had to go to point A and point B, and we accomplished it in a car ride.
In terms of, and here you are with your full team, and we have launched the business. So
thank you for again coming back to India. And India warmly welcomes you and your colleagues.
And to all my colleagues from the industry and the financial community, a very warm welcome.
And we look forward to working with each and every one of you. As Shireen said, I think that,
you know, Larry, there is an old Indian saying that a tree only attracts attention if it bears
fruit. And today, in this new era, as you described it, India and the tree of the Indian
economy is bearing fruit with great visibility, with sustainability and abundance. As everybody
said, right, we are confident, like we are the largest growing fast economic growth in the world.
Eight to 10% is possible and doable. And I think that sustained double digit is not ruled out.
So that gives us the, and that is why we are, after a long time, attracting all this attention.
And this has happened primarily because I think that the last 10, 15 years, right,
we had two successive periods with 10 years of Manmohan Singh, where we focused on growth.
And then we were very lucky to have now consistently 15 years of very stable leadership.
So stable economic leadership defines a country. And I think that we cannot, we have to be
thankful to Prime Minister Modi for giving us this stability now for like going in by 2029,
it will be 15 years. I also think that we've got a very, what is different about this is we've got
a very clear goal. A goal in terms of saying we have to be developed, Vixit Bharat by 2047,
which every Indian aspires to and has started believing in. Second, we've executed at scale,
right? While as Indians, we like to criticize ourselves, and we are not,
it's a good thing in a democratic mindset. But if you see, we've built more roads in the last
15 years than any other, like multiple times than any other country, including the United States,
as it speak. We've built like power capacities, we are now the leading renewable power producer
in the world. We've built in our own industry, digital capacities, 5G that is better than most
people in the world and cheaper than most people in the world, in terms of what and now every
Indian village has got 5G. So and I can go on like we've built the same thing in terms of
infrastructure, the roads that you see in Mumbai. For a long time, we said that we will connect
Mumbai to the mainland, and we now have the bridge that is running. So we've executed.
We've also had policy which is sustainable. So even when you see between governments, right,
we all thought that Aadhaar was the earlier government's piece. I think this government
was wise enough to say we've had continuity in policy at all times. In terms of that, we've had
stability, we've had predictability, we've also been conservative. So as Indian successive finance
ministers, we've always maintained our debt in order. Relative to global debt, we're still 50%
of GDP as debt. So we are not like the world norm is now 100%. So we've had and I think that
we've also in the private sector and what excites me the most is the startup industry.
When I interact with startups, and we see young 28, 30 year olds, starting up companies, and
I can clearly see, right, 100 new reliances in terms of where and the aspiration, the confidence
that they have. And finally, it is the confidence that you see. Fortunately, we now operate across
the length and breadth of India. So it's not only the confidence in forums like this.
But when you see the confidence in young people going to school and colleges, wanting and in
parents today, believing that their tomorrow is better than today. And that is a big, big change
in India, that all of us, this is our baby boomer generation. This is the Indian generation that
believes that they will make a better tomorrow than today. And that's the confidence that we see
as a result of all of this. And I don't want to rule out like when everybody we've also had,
right, at least I think a sustained 15-20 years of great law and order. And that is a prerequisite
to continuous economic growth, social harmony, all of these things matter in terms of that.
And hopefully, like we are now setting the foundation for many, many decades, the world
sees that. And that is why, you know, even like after the budget, we had the European Treaty,
we had fortunately the US, so the world is looking at us. We have like and we at Reliance get
at least every month, three or four global majors, we cannot say yes to everybody for partnerships
in terms of saying we want to come to India, and can we work together. So the world is taking
notice of India, it's a tree laden with abundant fruit. And I've always believed that for profit
and for prosperity, nobody needs an invitation. And that is why we are attracting all the people.
And I think this is very, very sustainable over the coming decades.
Sustainable for the coming decades, and 100 more Reliances, in your words from the startup
ecosystem, if that is, you know, comes true, and that bears fruit, it'll be a very, very different
economy, as you point out, Mr. Ambani. But you know, I just I want to understand from you,
since we're talking about Geo BlackRock, we're talking about the opportunity for India's
financial sector, a lot of people are asking, is the ambition and the aspiration to disrupt
this business just as you did with telecom, Mr. Ambani? Well, our ambition and aspiration
starts with, you know, what I admire about Larry. And Larry is not only right, the result oriented
CEO of US top global multinational, right. But I think that he has a very compassionate and
passionate heart. When he told me that look, like at the end of the day, purpose of BlackRock
is not to just make short term results, or not even to make returns for my investors and my
shareholders. If I cannot put this money to work, first for the betterment of society,
and as a byproduct, I give my investors and shareholders returns, then I would have done my
job. And that is the Reliance philosophy to we've always believed that our minds match,
and the purpose of Geo BlackRock. And I think that disruption is fashionable. But the opportunity
that we see is that Indians have really been savers, right, right from if you look at our
history, we are, we have saved consistently over the last five, six decades. What has happened is
that some of this saving has not been productive. If you see, just the last year, right, we as
India imported $60 billion worth of gold, and we imported 10 to $15 billion worth of silver.
And all of this not for industrial use, but really for domestic savings in terms of now,
this is unproductive. If we can actually convince the Indian saver, that if one invests in
the capital markets, in a safe, transparent, and consistent way, there are returns. And these
returns we heard from all the three panelists compound. And for us at Geo BlackRock, the
opportunity is to encourage Indians to save, but to make sure that we give them the options to
convert those savings into earnings, and hopefully, compound their earnings, so that they not only
work for themselves, but they also work for the Indian economy. And that propels the Indian
economy to grow in terms of what we want to do. And then we all grow together. So yes, if you
call that disruption, we will use technology distribution to achieve that for every Indian,
for every Indian household, for every Indian small business, and large businesses. That's our
objective. So from the foundation and the beginnings of BlackRock, we never focused on
targets of growth, ever. And yet, our focus has been relentlessly on the client, whether it's a
client who's awarding us 100 rupees, or a sovereign wealth fund who is awarding us tens of billions
of dollars. If you are working on behalf of each and every client, and you're serving that client
over a long horizon with good advice, with maybe a degree of safety, and importantly, just
confidence building about the opportunities of compounding over a long period of time,
through the utilization of technology to intersect more often, more frequently, to have deeper,
broader relationship with your clients, that's how disruption occurs. But disruption does not
occur because you set a target. The target is making sure you're living with purpose every
day with each and every client. And if you can achieve that with consistency day after day,
clients will reward you with more share of their wallet. And so to me, it's a process.
It's a process you have to earn every day, to live every day. And if you do that properly,
and you embedded that in the culture of the firm, we can be disruptive. But you can't be otherwise.
Yes, we can't be otherwise. You need to have the alignment of values. And then, of course,
everything else builds on top of that. Mr. Ambani, let me come back to you on the
investing in India's growth opportunity and this new era that we're speaking about,
and the role of making strategic choices today, which will require patient capital. And I want
to understand from your perspective, what it will take actually to build patiently with patient
capital over the next two decades. Well, I think that the Indian opportunity,
as we stand, we stand at about four, four and a half trillion dollars of GDP in a 110 trillion
dollar world. I see us outgrowing the world and finding the right place. So I'm one of those
believers who think that this four, four and a half in a 20, 30 year period will outgrow the
rest of the world and we will hit 25, 30 trillion dollars. It's going to be 30 years from now. But
as we do that, the India opportunity is a 10, 20, 30 year opportunity. And when you think about
solving India's energy problems, I am a believer that in the next decade, India will not import
80% of its energy. We have a path and God willing, like with technological breakthroughs,
we will be reasonably self-sufficient in energy. Investments in such like energy sectors which
make us self-sufficient are 20, 30 year time horizon. Investments in physical infrastructure
that we still need, we need, like we have the opportunity to build with today's technology,
the physical infrastructure for 1.4 billion people. We've just, we've done a lot but there's
a lot more to do. These are also 20, 30 year opportunities. Technological infrastructure,
we are not going to be behind the world in terms of building country scale intelligence
infrastructure so that every village has intelligence available to them. And this also
is a 20, 30 year opportunity. Each one of this is hundreds of billions of dollars of investment.
And within that, while the benefits are there, they're long term, sustainable,
compoundable opportunities. And that requires sustainable capital, which comes both from
within and outside. And to my mind, India is attracting, we ourselves, our own experience in
most of our industries is that it is not capital which is a problem. It is opportunities and
execution, right? And the ability to give an overall transparent framework to both the
consumers and the investors, which is the opportunity. It's not going to be limited
by patient capital. The world recognizes that India, because the world also doesn't have
many such scale opportunities where they can deploy on a few projects hundreds of billions
of dollars. Absolutely. The market, of course, in India presents a very compelling opportunity
across different sectors, as you spoke of. But Larry Fink, let's talk about AI and the power,
the potential of AI. And you're a big believer in the AI story, not just for BlackRock,
but in general. The stock market volatility notwithstanding, the fact that we're spending
hundreds of billions of dollars in this AI infrastructure build out, and this is sort
of front-loaded spending. And there's a question mark still on the revenues and the returns.
How do you sum up what is happening in the world of AI today? What do you look for? What do you
look at? I would first and state that I don't believe there's an AI bubble. You don't believe
that? Not at all. I believe the greatest risk we have is if we don't invest and continue to invest
China will win. And I believe the need to rapidly expand the AI opportunities is necessary.
That doesn't mean we're not going to have some bankruptcies. We'll have some failures. That's
capitalism. You're going to have some big successes and big failures. But the opportunity
that companies have in utilizing AI is going to be present in everything we do. I mean,
yesterday you had Anthropic announce a new model, which is going to be threatening for some
businesses, but it's going to be an opportunity for other businesses. You mentioned Davos and
you mentioned the word cloud. There's no question, AI is among the most topical conversations we're
having now, because it is disruptive. It's going to be disruptive for some industries,
but it's going to also be very advancing. I mean, the future of AI in terms of drug discovery,
in terms of humanity is real. The use of AI for the development of new sources of power or
cheaper sources of power, what can that mean in the long run for the global South? Could we have
abundance in energy one day? Now, that's still pretty far fetched at this moment,
but the opportunities of the acceleration of science is there. Rob Goldstein talked about
having the ability to use AI to learn everything about one subject in minutes now.
AI is going to allow more discovery, more opportunities, and with that technology,
like so many other technologies, it's going to be disruptive for some businesses and some economies.
The key for AI to be really successful in every society, we need to make sure that AI
broadens economic success and it doesn't narrow economic success. We talked about that a lot
in Davos the last two weeks, and that's going to be the real issue. Can AI be not only disruptive,
but can it be expanding and broadening economic success throughout all economies? That's going
to be the big question about how do we play that out. In the early part of AI, you're going to see
countries that are huge winners and some countries that are going to be left behind.
You have all this dynacism around how AI is going to be playing out. That is in the short run. In
the long run, I think it's going to be more democratizing, but in the first few parts of AI,
it's going to be more limiting. We look at AI as a huge opportunity.
For us in navigating the $14 trillion that we manage on behalf of our clients,
we have to use advanced technologies to process the business that we are already doing.
The same thing for all the other major companies. Through AI, you have better understanding of your
clients, better understanding of your inventory controls. You have so many advantages by the
application of AI and technology. That is, in the long run, going to be very powerful.
In so many of the developed economies, we have excessive deficits. It's a conversation that was
not talked about in Davos about the excessive deficits, which is a substantial problem for
many of the developed economies, including the United States. Can AI increase productivity?
If so, can we increase GDP with a diminishing population? That's going to be the question that
Korea is going to be asking, and Japan is going to be asking, and Italy. Can you have a growing
economy? Can you have a broadening of economic success with fewer people, with the utilization
of AI and robotics? I believe the answer is going to be profoundly yes, but it also means countries
that have very rapid-growing populations, that's going to be a bigger question. I think India is
at the nexus of a large-based population, but the one thing that I've noticed, India is more
accepting of technologies than many of the developed countries. India is more accepting
related to change than most developed economies. Because of the large-scale population,
AI is going to create jobs and disrupt jobs, but for those economies that are willing to accept
change and rapidly deploy that change in a positive way, and I think about India, the way
it rapidly transformed its economy with the digitization of the rupee. To me, that was a
wonder to watch, and so to me, AI is going to be a powerful growth engine in the world,
but we need to make sure it's a growth engine for more. You're absolutely right, and to your
point about India surprising on the digitization front, this was a surprising fact for me as well.
The Binance CEO in Davos telling me that India is the number one adopter of blockchain technology,
and that's something that I was not aware of, but Mr. Ambani, since we're talking about AI
and we're talking about technology, to Larry Fink's point, how do we leverage all of this to
create shared wealth creation? Well, I think that I'm a believer, have been a believer that we have
to embrace technology. We cannot run away from it, and AI is real. From an India point of view,
it is hugely advantageous. If we think about 200 million children in our schools,
and if we now think about connectivity to all our schools, and we give ourselves a goal that in
one decade, with a fraction of the total GDP that others spend on education, we can deliver to each
of these 200 million kids, including in the remotest village, quality education. I think
without AI, this problem, we could not have dreamt about solving it, and we will. We are also
participating in this opportunity. This is a solvable problem. You take healthcare and saying
India is a large economy, 1.4 billion people, but without any social security, without any organized
health safety net, as yet relative to all the other countries, can we deliver? Everybody,
like the large economies, spend 8%, 10%, 12% of their GDP on delivering healthcare to their
citizens. A large amount of it is wasted in terms of what, and everybody recognizes this. Can we in
India take care of all our 1.4 billion people with a digital physical health system at a fraction of
global cost? The answer is we cannot do it without AI. Security. Again, critical for
our safety for all our 1.4 billion people, if you use AI and complement it with your
simple taxation, we can now have the ability to have for each citizen, each company, the
transactional transparency, so your taxpaying becomes as simple as when you stay in a hotel
and you have an electronic system, you can see all your transactions both ways, and there are
no disputes, and it becomes a much predictable, enforceable society. That's AI, and we shouldn't
get scared of AI. It's exactly like when the industrial revolution came. Humanity moved
forward. Productivity moved forward. We moved from 0.3% growth for many, many decades or many
centuries to 3% growth overall, and at that time, if you go back 200 years and if you ask people,
can people travel 2,000 kilometers a day? You'd say not possible. Today, all of us, not two, but
flying, we can travel 30,000 kilometers a day, and I think we're just at the beginning of that age.
We must embrace it. India has the opportunity, and what we see, as you said, is we see that
young Indians, as Kamath Sahib said, old Indians, right? India just adapts to technology faster
than everybody. We've seen it firsthand over the last five years in terms of what we want,
and we should use that at our competitive advantage. Embrace this. Get the productivity
advantage. Get the earnings advantage. Build a better society and use tomorrow's technology
before anybody else so that we catch up from our $4,000 or a few thousand dollars per capita
to double digit per capita, and then get to the US is still at $40,000, $50,000 per capita,
so we've got a long way to go. This is our path to catch up, and I think the world will allow us
to catch up with them in the next two decades, and that's an opportunity. From my point of view,
at Reliance, we are taking this opportunity with both hands in terms of that. It's a once in
tens of centuries opportunity, and we can, if we embrace technology, if we allow our youth to
embrace that, right, then in the next 20, 30 years, we can redefine India and find our true
position in the world. A multi-generational opportunity, as you put it, Mr. Ambani, but Mr.
Pink, let me address the issue that you brought up and said it didn't get enough attention in
Davos, and that was deficit, but what did get a lot of attention in Davos was, of course,
the interest rate trajectory that the world is going to be faced with, and how you see some of
these factors impacting markets globally, the investment sentiment globally as well.
Where do you see interest rates headed? Do you believe that we're likely to see
more cuts coming in, and what will be some of the other crucial risks that investors need to watch
for? Well, all those questions are for the short term, so let me answer some short-term questions.
Look at the markets. The markets are honest. I mean, any single day, the markets may miscalculate
something, but over time, markets is a great mirror of what's really going on, so whether
there's political pressure one way or the other, sure, that could shape a market over any one day
or week, but markets actually are bigger than any individual or any economy, and so if the
Federal Reserve eases too early, and we see inflation, we see measures that prove it wrong,
you're going to have a steepening of the yield curve, so all those issues to me are not that
important, to be honest. I know they're important for day traders. They're important for media,
because they can talk about all the churn and all that, but it really doesn't matter that much,
and I don't really spend that much time focusing on those type of issues. Over the course of any
one quarter, any one year, yeah, sure, they matter, but over time, the markets correct itself
and rebalance itself, and that's pretty much the message that we have to constantly talk about,
because the message is not about the moment, and everybody gets so confused about the politics,
the polarization of opinions, the politicization of everything, and yet,
over time, that's the beauty of markets. The markets are an honest reflection of global
economies over the long run, and if you believe in humanity, if you believe that
we correct our problems over time, I actually believe the things you read in the newspaper,
all the stuff we read that's frightening, I get actually excited, because we're talking about
those issues, and generally, we mitigate most of the things that are on the front pages.
We actually mitigate, so I actually am pleased when I see all the things, all these terrible
things, and I'm not trying to say that each and one of those things may be really terrible, but
the fact that we're talking about it, it mitigates. We self-correct. The things that you don't read
in the newspaper that you think are a problem, those are the things that bother me, like the
long-term issues of deficits that we don't spend enough time talking about. How do we mitigate it?
The best way we mitigate it is through growth, and that's what I try to tell every political
leader. How do you grow your economy? Because if you grow your economy, the deficits will be
smaller as a percent of GDP, and so I don't get bothered by most of the stuff I read,
because it's a good thing. That's the power of the press, to identify all the issues,
but through that identification of the issues, we mitigate those issues. You think about all
the problems you read, and all the wars, and all the skirmishes, but in most cases, over time,
they resolve themselves. You think about how problematic everything is when we entered this
year, and yet over, you know, when you think about the beginning of 2025, everybody was so
nervous about everything, yet markets did great over 2025. We have some form of resolution in Gaza
and Israel. There are so many other areas in the world where we actually have diminished risk,
but if you ask the average person who reads the paper, they would think things are actually worse
than they are, and to me, obviously, negative news sells far better than positive stories,
and so what I'm trying to say, and my message to everybody is, yes, please be a global reader of
what's going on, but don't get so alarmed by it, because we're going to mitigate most of those
problems, because that's what we do as human beings, and that is the whole message about
long-term optimism. You know, long-term optimists generally win. You know, Elon Musk said in Davos,
it's better to be an optimist and being wrong than being a pessimist who's right, and I think about
just Elon himself for a second. I've never met a person who is as smart as he is, but with the
imagination that he has and the guts to do what he's done, and I think in building that out, and
I would just liken that to Mukesh Abani, the ambition, the imagination, and those are the key
things in growth and opportunity, and to me, this is what we all want to be a part of. We want to
invest with the people who have ambition, who have the guts to do things that break the mold, that
changes society, but they change society because of imagination and guts, and to me, that's the
beauty of being a long-term investor. Absolutely, so being an optimist and getting it wrong versus
a pessimist and getting it right, in Elon Musk's words, is more important, and you agree with him,
but Mr. Abani, you know, you were talking about the startup ecosystem, and I want to understand
from you, you know, both of you spoke about changing the mindset from savings to investing,
and both of you are focused on generating growth. What is the message to the young Indian saver
today? What would both of you tell the young Indian saver, and let me start by asking you, Mr. Abani.
Well, Shireen, I think that, to my mind, the India opportunity is genuinely a new era.
It's now, we can see it visibly over the next two or three decades in terms of,
and all of us agree that growth, and we take growth for granted, but let me tell you,
all over the world, people would die for 10% year-on-year growth, and we are growing on a
large base, and we will sustain that. So for any young Indian, right, this growth is going to be
converted to growth into his or her income, and so you would have income growth. We've got to
continue our savings mindset. We still want to be conservative. We don't want to inherit
too many deficit problems. We are still okay. So as long as we save, and if we make that mental
mindset in terms of saying we will go and invest our savings to grow with India back into productive
uses, to have these productive uses, Jio, BlackRock, and the whole financial community,
today, to my mind, like the, while we all talked about one minute, I still think that from my
perception, right, access to investments and productive, compoundable investments is complex.
It's not affordable, and it's not available to all, and that is what every young Indian should
demand for, and it's our job in industry to do exactly what we did with Jio, that it should be
available to all, and then people will benefit from the power of compounding. I think that we
talked about compounding, but money in a bank account lying in simple interest is not compounding.
Money in stock market is compounding, and India has an efficient market. We have now regulated it
well, and if we can channelize this money to grow for every Indian along with them, right, that is
the opportunity that we have where hundreds of millions of Indians, right, become owners of
wealth and don't only observe wealth creation, and I think that India is well equipped. The
institutional mechanism as well as the corporate mechanism is aligned with that very fact that we
are here utilizing all the technologies to enable this for Indians is there, and within
this framework, right, there are still many, many unsolved problems, and even after three decades
there'll be many unsolved problems, so the opportunity for startups, think in a big macro
piece, right, it's a hundred and ten trillion dollar world, four and a half trillion India, right, four
and a half, the 110 trillion dollar world with AI productivity will go up to a 300 trillion dollar
world in three decades, right. India has the opportunity to take its share, so there is like
35 trillion, we have 30 trillion of new value, right, that has to be created, and that means
there is 30 trillion of new market value, and that is what people will participate in in the next
three decades, and that's why even 100 alliances might not be enough, but that's the opportunity
for a young Indian starting today. I think your message to young Indians in the context
of what you've seen happen in the other countries that you operate in. Mostly believe in your own
country, believe in the opportunity growth, I mean think about it, if India can grow 10 percent a
year, and let's assume this the stock market only grows at 10 percent a year, it generally it grows
at a multiple of the growth of the GDP, but let's assume, you know, that means you're
doubling your pool of money every six and a half years, okay, that's a pretty good
outcome, that's much better than keeping your money in a bank account, and to me that's
the foundational issue, grow with your country, and if you believe that there's leverage
in the system, which there is, you're going to, if the economy grows at 10 percent, the equity markets
are going to grow, you know, five, six points above that over time, and so to me that is the
fund, that's the foundational to build financial security, dignity when you're in retirement,
and to me that is a whole foundational issue for a successful economy. You know, you spend a lot of
your time fishing, Larry, I believe, and you know, I believe this deal got done in a car,
and it was less than... We weren't fishing, no. No, you were not fishing, but what was the bait?
Friendship. Friendship, that is the perfect note to end this conversation, Larry Pink, Mukesh
Ambani, thank you so very much for joining us and giving us a long-term perspective
of the strength of the India story and the strength of this partnership. Appreciate your
time. Ladies and gentlemen, a big round of applause for Larry Pink and Mukesh Ambani.
