San Francisco: Narendra Modi, India's newly appointed Prime Minister, has an excellent reputation as being "decisive and focused" on business, which is going to be "very good" for the country, tech giant Cisco Chairman John Chambers has said.
The three-time Gujarat Chief Minister has steered the BJP to a landslide victory in general elections, with the party winning a majority in Parliament. It is the first time since 1984 that a single party has won a majority on its own.
"The new government came in without forming a coalition and Narendra Modi as a PM has an excellent reputation as being decisive and focused on business," Chambers told reporters here.
"I think that is going to be very good for the country and I am very optimistic of what that means to the country's economic growth," he added. On the past issues of policy paralysis and the way ahead, he said India has a chance to get economic growth going again and what is needed for the young people.
"I am very much a believer in India and the rule of law. India has 600,000 engineers, English-speaking... It has tremendous resource to focus in on," Chambers said. He added: "I think that India as a country is very resilient... I am very committed to see our business in India not stay at one and a half per cent or so but a number much higher than that. But I think, having a government that has a majority by itself will allow for tough decisions to be made as well as good decisions to be made... So I am very optimistic about the new PM. I think that I will be surprised if India does not grow its GDP well over the next 3 or 4 years."
Cisco is "deeply committed" to India and the company expects to increase its business well over the 2 per cent, he said. "We are committed to the long run," Chambers added.
Cisco has over 10,000 employees in India across cities like Bangalore, Delhi-NCR, Mumbai, Chennai, Kolkata, Pune and Hyderabad. Of these, 8,000 people are part of the R&D set up. Although the company gets about 2 per cent of its over USD 48 billion global revenues from India, it is confident of growing the share. It expects to garner 5 per cent of its revenues from the Indian market in the next five years with business growing over 20 per cent.
