'Talent pool unmatched on the planet': EMQQ founder Kevin Carter hails India as an emerging market

San Francisco-based investment management and research firm EMQQ Global’s founder Kevin Carter called India the perfect emerging market, buoyed by a young population and a wide adoption of technology. Carter also said that India is a lot like China from 15 years ago, with the exception that China did not have smartphones then, which India has now. 

In a conversation with Bob Pisani on the ETF Edge show on CNBC, Carter said that people want to invest in emerging markets because that’s where most people are, they are younger, and their economies are growing faster. “In terms of India, it is leading all those categories. It is now bigger than China population-wise, it has got more than half of its population under the age of 30, it has the fastest growing economy…it actually beat the estimates and in the last two quarters and has grown over 7 per cent,” said Carter, listing the factors why India is the perfect emerging market. 

“Most of that growth is in consumption and what is coming along with that is a $12-dollar supercomputer – the smartphone is bringing those billions of consumers online for the first time," Carter added, referring to Reliance Jio's feature phone. "On top of that you have got a government that’s a democracy that’s supporting technology and you’ve got a talent pool that’s really unmatched on the planet. So it is in every way, the perfect emerging market,” said Carter.

Carter also explained that India’s Aadhaar system was a game-changer for the country in terms of technology. “What India has built is its own proprietary digital public infrastructure. Digital public infrastructure that most people are familiar with are things like the internet and GPS. India has built its own to run the whole country on it. It starts with a programme called the Aadhaar, which means foundation, which is a digital identification system where basically everybody in the country now is tied, their identity is tied to their fingerprints and their eyeball scan in this database that was launched in 2010. What they have used to do is basically enable around 800 million people to open a digital bank account using just their fingerprint and eyeball and also to open 500 million new smartphone subscriptions. They brought everyone into the financial system and they brought everyone there in a technological way,” he said. 

While the phone is not as sophisticated as some of the top-end mobile phones in use today, the “$12 supercomputer” gives two things that entry-level consumers in India want, said Carter. “First is payments. That's where the digital stars are mostly exploding. Number of real-time digital payments in India is exploding. Second is video. It does not have the biggest screen but it does get video with the lowest-cost data in the world offered by Reliance Jio. It has really been a game changer in India,” said Carter. 

Carter’s statements come as India’s growth continues to grab eyeballs. Recently, the IMF's Mission of India, said that India has emerged as the star performer. “What we have been observing for quite some time now is that India has been growing at a very robust rate. It's one of the star performers when it comes to real growth when you look at peer countries. It’s one of the fastest growing large emerging markets and it's contributing, in our current projections, more than 16 per cent of global growth this year,” said Nada Choueiri in an interview with PTI. As per IMF’s annual Article IV consultation with India, the economy is on track to be one of the fastest-growing major economies in the world. 

Also read: India a ‘star performer’; projected to contribute over 16% to global growth: IMF