A combination of exports from India
and Japan to serve African demand

Kubota, explained Kitao, is the fourth-largest manufacturer of farm tractors in India, where it acquired a local tractor manufacturer in 2022. Along with serving domestic demand in India, it exported about 3,000 tractors in Europe in the past year, and it is moving to nurture markets for its Indian tractors in Africa, Southeast Asia, North America, and South America.

“Africa has at least as much farmland as India,” noted Kitao, “but lags in mechanization. Whereas India’s market for tractors totals about 900,000 units annually, African agriculture remains largely dependent on manual labor and animal power, and farmers have purchased only about 24,000 tractors annually in recent years. Tractor demand is rising in Africa as population growth and rising standards of living present rising demand for food. We therefore perceive immense potential for growth in Africa and are cultivating that potential with a combination of exports from India and from Japan.”

Kubota has sold about 700 tractors annually in Africa in recent years, Kitao reported, and is aiming to increase that number to 4,000 by 2030. The company is pursuing that growth by broadening and upgrading its distribution network and by promoting durable, low-cost tractors from India in the field crop market and tractors from Japan in the rice and orchard markets.

Devolution of management authority as crucial

“Upgrading skills,” emphasized Jawa, “is the biggest challenge and the biggest opportunity in Global South nations. And that has been my prime emphasis in management. Daikin has operated in India since 2000. It has invested in multiple factories, in R&D centers, and in strategic acquisitions under the ‘Make in India’ policy. We became India’s market leader in the heating, ventilation, and air-conditioning industry in 2015, and we have achieved sales growth of more than 10-fold in the past decade. That is a tribute to the exceptional trust that management in Japan has placed in their Indian management to make decisions speedily.

“India is a land of opportunity, but it has no straight line,” acknowledged Jawa. “It is a land of complexities, not one nation but 28 states—different languages, different cultures, different food habits. For Japanese companies to tap Indian’s strength, they need to empower their local managements. The way that the local managers deal with the ecosystem in India can be difficult for Japanese to understand, but trusting local management to cope with the problems that arise is the best way to proceed.

“When Daikin opened its first plant in India in 2009, it was operating with an engineering mindset. We later positioned ourselves as a marketing company—a company that offers an extensive product portfolio and undertakes responsive marketing campaigns. Since 2020, we have developed export business in accordance with Indian government policy. We started by establishing footholds in seven East African nations. And we have since secured footholds in Ghana and South Africa and also in Nigeria, where our distributor handles assembly as well as distribution. Along with supplying products, we put in place solid service capabilities on the ground there. We are moving to replicate our Indian success in Africa.”

Sterling brand value in IT services

Aoki is well versed in the Indian IT sector, having worked for three of the nation’s four largest IT companies: Wipro Technologies, Tata Consultancy Services, and now Infosys. His presentation began with a capsule summary of the history of the IT industry in India. Aoki recounted the 1977 government edict that capped foreign companies’ equity holdings in their Indian operations at 40%. That led to the withdrawal of IBM from the Indian market, leaving a vacuum in the IT sector. Into that vacuum came Wipro and Infosys.

“Infosys and four other Indian companies,” noted Aoki, “ranked among the world’s 10 most valuable brands in information services in 2024.” That is according to the latest installment in Brand Finance’s widely cited comparative valuation of brands by sector. Aoki acknowledged that the Infosys presence in Africa remains small but reported that the company’s operations in South Africa serve several banks in African nations with IT support. He mentioned Indians’ extensive experience in Africa and encouraged Japanese companies to tap Indian skills and expertise in developing business there.

As for Japan, Aoki reported that Infosys has built a large presence in the IT sector there since arriving in 1997. He bemoaned, however, Japan’s low attainment in digitization. Japan placed just 31st, Aoki sighed, in the 2024 installment of the World Digital Competitiveness Ranking compiled by the Lausanne, Switzerland–based International Institute for Management Development. He referred on a positive note, however, to a promising move by the Japanese government: its pledge to host 50,000 Indians, mainly IT engineers, in Japan over the next five years.

Just four hours from Mumbai

“Fellow South Asian nations comprise the biggest market for Indian exports,” Nakajo observed. “But Africa is an important export market for India beyond that region.” He displayed a slide that showed that Africa absorbed about 10% of India’s exports in 2024. His slide presented a comparison of India’s weighting in exports from France, India, Japan, Turkey, the United Kingdom, and the United States. India featured the highest weighting for Africa, followed by Turkey’s, at about 8%.

“Geographical proximity figures large in these results,” Nakajo commented. “Nairobi is just a four-hour flight from Mumbai.”

Nakajo then displayed three slides in succession that revealed breakdowns of India’s direct foreign investment by region, by sector, and by African nation. Africa accounted for the largest percentage of India’s cumulative direct investment outside Asia and Oceania in 2024, at 21.6%. Energy resources, unsurprisingly, were the largest sectoral target for investment, but Indian companies have also invested heavily in the chemicals and communications sectors in Africa. Reflecting the sectoral distribution of India’s African investment, the nations that had received the most investment by 2024 were Egypt, Nigeria, and Mozambique.

With his final slide, Nakajo presented a comparison of the average monthly salary for a general engineer in six African cities and in New Delhi. The figures displayed a great deal of discrepancy among the African cities, but they were higher for all those cities than for New Delhi. That is an important consideration for Japanese manufacturers who are weighing options for serving African markets. Some will find, suggested Nakajo, that they will do better to produce their goods in India and export them to Africa rather than produce them locally there. But fulfilling those companies’ role in nurturing mutually beneficial African-Indian ties needs to encompass more, he added, than export business. The Japanese need to take part in cultivating Africa’s human resources, Nakajo urged, and invest in developing the downstream segments of value chains.

An India-centered Japanese automaker

Ayukawa detailed India’s central position in his company’s business. The nation is Suzuki’s largest market. It accounted for about 42% of the company’s consolidated net sales in the fiscal year to March 2024. India accounted for an even larger share of Suzuki’s unit sales of automobiles, at about 57%, and it accounted for about 40% of the company’s unit sales of motorcycles. Suzuki’s share of India’s automobile market is larger than 40%. The company’s Indian subsidiary Maruti Suzuki exported about 280,000 vehicles in the fiscal year to March 2024, nearly half of them to Africa.

Suzuki’s Indian production of automobiles reached a record volume, at nearly 2 million vehicles, in the fiscal year to March 2024, and it is on track to exceed that volume in the present fiscal year. The company’s cumulative production of automobiles in India reached 30 million vehicles in March 2024.

Ayukawa emphasized Maruti Suzuki’s role in the vanguard of Suzuki’s product technology. He displayed photos, for example, of the battery-powered e VITARA. Suzuki launched that model, its first battery-powered vehicle for global marketing, in India in January 2025 and will produce it there. Ayukawa also introduced other ways that Suzuki is working to reduce the environmental impact of motor transport. He described, for example, the company’s activity in developing technology for producing automotive fuel from cow dung. Ayukawa concluded his remarks with a summary of Suzuki initiatives for nurturing human resources and promoting entrepreneurship in India.

Half the world’s population of young people in 2050

“Any discussion of Africa’s immense potential needs to begin,” stated Ando, “with demographics. Here are the world’s 2.5 billion people aged 15 to 34—the individuals who are the prime movers in socioeconomic dynamics.” Ando displayed a stacked-bar graph as he spoke that revealed population trends in that age bracket by region from 1974 to 2023. Readily visible in the graph was that young-population growth has been most striking in India and in sub-Saharan Africa (the graph having omitted from “Sub-Saharan Africa” South Africa, which it included in “Original BRICS”, and Seychelles, which it included in “High Income Countries”). “As you can see, nearly 40% of the world’s young people live in those two regions,” commented Ando.

Next, Ando displayed two line graphs in succession for the 1974-to-2023 and 2024-to-2050 time spans that contrasted the 15-to-34 population trends for China, India, and sub-Saharan Africa. “China’s population of young people,” he observed, “has been declining for nearly 30 years. India’s has continued growing but is about to top out at about 500 million. On the other hand, the 15-to-34 population in sub-Saharan Africa has grown to more than 400 million and is on track to exceed 700 million by 2050. Sub-Saharan Africa and India will at that time account for half the world’s population of young people.”

Ando included in his presentation a slide that emphasized Africa’s geographical immensity. It featured superimposed maps that revealed that China, India, Europe, and the continental United States would all fit into Africa’s area. He also included a detailed summary of JICA initiatives for cultivating African human resources.

Basic management competence

Shigeta, asked by the moderator to cite defining characteristics of Indian human resources, demurred. “India encompasses too vast a range of people to fold into any glib characterization. The best I can do is offer a characterization of Indians overall as incredibly diverse. They present numerous ethnicities across the subcontinent and speak numerous languages. And that very diversity is perhaps their single most definitive characteristic, at least as a whole.

“Another characteristic I can cite in the collective sense is the vast size of India’s population. India has 10 times as many people as Japan. Let’s say for the sake of argument that especially intelligent and capable people account for 5% of the population in each nation. That would mean that India has 10 times as many such individuals as Japan does. Demographic factors like that are an important consideration in contemplating India’s strengths.”

The moderator then asked Shigeta to comment on how well Japanese companies in India are doing at identifying and recruiting topflight human resources. “You look around the world, and you see Indians who have distinguished themselves spectacularly well, as in the CEOs at Google and Microsoft [Sundar Pichai and Satya Nadella]. Sadly, hardly any Indians have taken the helm at Japanese companies as CEO. The lone exception that comes to mind is Lekh Raj Juneja, at the big rice cracker company Kameda Seika.

“Even Japanese who recognize India as a fount of management talent tend to focus narrowly on the tech sector. An Indian woman [Leena Nair] heads the fashion giant Chanel as CEO, and several Indians head large financial services companies. So Indian management talent is not just a tech thing. And aptitude for steering operations in any given market is not a matter of ethnic identification; it’s a matter of basic management competence.”