| Wednesday, 17 December 2025 |
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Good morning [%first_name |Dear Reader%],
The fact that Bharti Airtel has been India’s top wealth creator, in absolute terms, in the past five years made headlines late last week.
The telco’s market value is up by almost Rs 8 lakh crore ($88 billion) since 2020, revealed a study by Motilal Oswal Financial Services. In other words, Bharti has added an Infosys and then some.
But this wasn’t particularly surprising since only Reliance Industries, which owns Bharti rival Jio Infocomm, and HDFC Bank are worth more than Bharti now—an outcome few would have foreseen a few years ago, when Jio was the bane of Bharti’s existence.
I was more interested in another table in the Motilal report, not least because it assessed companies over a much longer period.
| Source: Motilal Oswal’s Annual Wealth Creation Study |
India’s economy crossed $1 trillion in 2007, and has since quadrupled, and NTD in the table refers to the “next trillion dollars” of gross domestic product. Of the 500 largest companies by market value in 2008, only 35 companies have grown their revenue at least at the same rate as nominal GDP, which doesn’t account for inflation, and have also outperformed the Nifty 50 index.
At first glance, the composition of the list wouldn’t make heads turn. But this would:
Of the 35 compounders, 27 (77%) were market leaders in the base year 2008. This is a highly significant finding. Market leaders (the top 3 in a given business) tend to enjoy a high share of the current and future profit pool of their respective sectors. They also have the scale and the financial power to withstand and recover from the occasional macroeconomic and sector-specific shocks which may adversely affect their smaller counterparts.
At least seven on the list, including Tata Consultancy Services (TCS), Asian Paints, and Maruti Suzuki, were not just in the top three in their respective sectors in 2008 but were, in fact, numero uno. They continue to hold that position.
The dominance of the companies on the list took me back to a persuasive opinion piece Seema wrote in Make India Competitive Again, one of our premium newsletters, in July. She based her arguments on a research paper that looked at the preponderance of family business groups in India between 2000 and 2020.
The top 25 groups contribute 15–20% of India’s GDP.
Interestingly, 11 companies on the Motilal list belong to eight of these 25 business groups.
As Seema wrote,
Family business groups (FBG) have dominated the Indian economy for decades. This trend is not accidental—successive governments and their policies, industrial and otherwise, have favoured them. Still, one would have expected at least some new stars to have emerged with the arrival of the internet economy in the early 2000s.
But the Indian economy’s FBG trait is rather dominant; it expresses itself in every generation. As the authors show, very few non-FBGs are represented among the country’s top business groups, underscoring the enduring nature of family control over major industries. In fact, there are only three non-FBGs—L&T, Infosys, and ITC—among India’s top 25 business groups.
The hidden costs of superstar family businesses, The Ken
Being part of a diversified business group alone doesn’t mean a smooth ride to the top. The spectacular failures of Anil Ambani’s companies are a case in point.
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