The year 2014 was a good year for Indian entrepreneurs looking to raise capital, which was fortunate for Vijay Shanker Sharma, founder of Paytm, at the time a 4-year old digital wallet firm, with plans to build an e-commerce marketplace. “It was the first time we were really part of the world. Everyone was supporting our budding entrepreneurs”, he says. “Everyone saw what our consumer market could become.”
“Everyone wanted to be a tiger cub,” he adds in a reference to Tiger Global, the tech investment firm that was then very active in the country. But Mr Sharma was not among the aspiring cubs. He knew India was an open playground, as he puts it, with no protection for domestic payers against their much better endowed foreign competitors and that the competition would be fierce. He wanted long term money and he wanted Chinese money because he thought China was a more relevant business model than anywhere else.
Today, Paytm has become the Indian face of Alibaba and its Ant Financial unit. While most of the most powerful American tech firms, such as Amazon, Facebook and Google, have planted their own flags on Indian soil, (at times triggering a debate about digital colonialism), the Chinese firms have chosen a more indirect strategy. They have opted to put capital in leading Indian start-ups, setting up proxy wars, with Ali behind Paytm while its great domestic rival Tencent backs Flipkart.