Sunil Bharti Mittal Explains Why India Needs To SCALE Like China: Just Need Leverage, That's All!
📅 Jan 22, 2026Mint9 MIN6222 VIEWS11 SEGMENTS · 5 SPEAKERS
Davos 2026 | World Economic Forum | India
Billionaire industrialist Sunil Bharti Mittal said during a conversation at Davos that while he was confident India would get a good trade from the U.S., but India has to accelerating infrastructure build-out and expand manufacturing capacity for a far greater leverage in an increasingly protectionist global trade environment.
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Questions asked in this interview
2
2:09So how have the tariff tweets affected your assessment of doing business in India, because you source and you have a marketplace as well?
8:01I want to ask you what your view on AI is, because we are offering pervasive access to our market to foreign AI players. How do you see that?
In the end, you have to make yourself stronger to get the best deal. We have seen how China was not pushed back by the US the way they wanted to and they quickly backed off. We have to make ourselves big. One great advantage we have is we are a market for everybody in the world — 1.5 billion consuming, hungry young Indians taking more products and services every day, and producing for the world. That gives us tremendous leverage with many other parts of the world to get the right deals. About 83% of world trade moves between countries other than the US. I don't think it will ever come to not trading with the US, but if tariffs become completely untenable, the world will react and find ways in other markets. What India really needs to do is scale — scale its technologies, scale its production, get to a point where it has consumer surpluses to send to the world, like China. That will take some time. The good news is India recognized early that this is time-consuming and capital-intensive — you need more roads, ports, airports, railways, which would take 10, 15, 20 years and hundreds of billions of dollars. India mitigated this by getting a digital highway in place and providing enough energy to power it. On top of that, a digital stack was built to connect everybody for banking, health services, and everything else. This has given us a cushion while the hard infrastructure is being built. Year after year, India is getting stronger. My own belief is that eventually India will get a fair deal even from the US. I remain confident.
But the point is, I think there is too much noise now on the here and now, the short-term impact, and we are putting too much energy as a society on mitigating the pain. I strongly agree that these are defining times — times where you can build a new competitive advantage as a company, as a country. Let's take one example where we are heavily investing and advocating: the marriage between sustainability and affordability. We are investing in circularity — the more you invest there, the more you secure a future that is good for the planet and good for the wallet, because many people today are struggling. By day two of the month, almost all the money is gone. So it's good for people, but it also builds independence — not only in energy but in trade. What does it take for India to produce from the waste created in India? If you have that approach, you start to depend less on global trade, and the same will happen with other countries. We need to find win-win opportunities where we decide not to put money into mitigating pain but into leapfrogging as a competitive advantage. India is one of those countries. India has proven it — I was living in India when Aadhaar got implemented, and more than 900 million people voted in the election overnight in one month with no disruption. That doesn't happen in other countries. Then came digital payments, demonetization. India has proven that when things come together, it can really leapfrog significantly. So what does it take for India to now be the leader on sustainability and affordability, because it comes with three big benefits?
Okay, I have four minutes and I do want to get into AI, so you will have to keep your answers a bit short so that I can give everyone a chance. Right now the AI race seems to be between the US and China. Do you read that correctly, or does India have a place in this race?
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Mittal, S. (2026, January 22). Sunil Bharti Mittal Explains Why India Needs To SCALE Like China: Just Need Leverage, That's All! [Interview transcript]. Mint. CEOInterviews.AI. https://ceointerviews.ai/interview/1049020/
MLA
Sunil Mittal. "Sunil Bharti Mittal Explains Why India Needs To SCALE Like China: Just Need Leverage, That's All!." Mint, 22 Jan. 2026. Transcript, CEOInterviews.AI, https://ceointerviews.ai/interview/1049020/.
BibTeX
@misc{mittal2026_1049020,
author = {Sunil Mittal},
title = {Sunil Bharti Mittal Explains Why India Needs To SCALE Like China: Just Need Leverage, That's All!},
howpublished = {Interview transcript, Mint. CEOInterviews.AI},
year = {2026},
month = {jan},
url = {https://ceointerviews.ai/interview/1049020/},
note = {Speaker-attributed transcript with timestamps}
}
