2008 September 02 | IndusLatin

Promoting India Latin America Collaboration

Cultural Differences – Silence in Conversations

September 2nd, 2008 Posted in India, Latin America, Philosophy and Culture

Today I was speaking to an Argentine business associate and he shared with me some frustrations. He was telling me how he communicates via email with potential Indian clients(government and company officials) and then does not get a response for long periods of time or not at all. I told him there could be various reasons but one of the major ones I could think of was the differing attidude to gaps in conversational silence.

Different cultures have conversations at varying rates. In the United States, there is typically almost no time lag (1 or 2 seconds) between when a person stops talking and the other person starts talking. At least, that is the expectation. If no response is heard within a 1 to 3 second timeframe, the listener could be perceived as dull, slow-witted, uninterested. So Americans use a lot of filler words/sounds in conversation to indicate they are following along – Uhuh, Yup, Yeah, Right, I hear ya, Right on. Many Westen European countries too expect a quick response (UK, Spain).

In Asia, India included, silence is used as a form of respect – to carefully consider the words of others, especially in business settings. The gaps in conversational silence in India could exceed 10 seconds. Of course, it is smaller while interacting in social settings. Bottomline, Indians are comfortable with long silences in the midst of conversations, especially while senior business people or older people are present.

This attitude extends to email conversations as well. So, longer gaps are expected between when a email is received and when a response is given. Usually, an Indian business person has to consult one or more team members and/or a boss before they can give you a response. This can take time.

A related issue is conversational tone. Latins typically vary their tone from excited to calm while Indians typically adopt a neutral tone. This should not be taken to mean lack of interest – it is just a different style.

So what – how can any misunderstanding be reduced?

1) Know that differences exist with regard to silences during conversation - both face-to-face and email

2) Set expectations – let your counterpart (colleague/client) know whether you expect a response and within what timeframe, and where applicable in what format and level of detail.

3) Follow-up with a another email and/or a telephone call – People get 100 to 200 email messages a day. Your message could have slipped through the cracks. When a week or 2 weeks have passed after sending a message, I’ve wondered if the other party is angry at me. After I make a phone call, I realize my message never reached or was caught by a spam filter.

Popularity: 24% [?]

CSIR, Godavari Sugar to set up India’s first sugar cane biorefinery

September 2nd, 2008 Posted in Agriculture, Energy, India, Science and Innovation

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livemint

The Council of Scientific and Industrial Research, or CSIR, has teamed up with Karnataka-based The Godavari Sugar Mills Ltd, or GSML, to set up the country’s first biorefinery to convert crushed sugar cane into industrial raw materials such as cellulose and lignin.

Waste management: The biorefinery at GSML will be equipped to produce ethanol from bagasse, the fibre left after the juice has been squeezed out of sugar cane, though the technology is still at a preliminary stage.

The biorefinery at GSML will be equipped to produce ethanol from bagasse, the fibre left after the juice has been squeezed out of sugar cane, though the technology is still at a preliminary stage. Photograph: Ramesh Pathania / Mint
Cellulose and lignin are extensively used in the pharmaceutical, textile and food preservatives industries.

The biorefinery at GSML, part of the Somaiya Group, will be equipped to produce ethanol from bagasse, the fibre left over after the juice has been squeezed out of sugar cane, though the technology is still at a preliminary stage.

“We believe that once scaled up to commercial levels, there will be international interest in the cellulose we’re able to manufacture because the costs will be extremely competitive,” said Samir Somaiya, director, GSML.

Countries such as Brazil and the US have successfully tapped
commercial grade ethanol from sugar cane juice and maize, respectively.
But they involve utilizing the starchy, or food component of these
crops, to extract ethanol.

The private sector in the country,
too, is eyeing opportunities in bio-refineries and cellulosic ethanol
(ethanol from agricultural waste) market. Srinivas Kilambi, director at
Reliance Industries Ltd, had in a 2006 presentation at a renewable
energy conference, outlined plans for a corn-based biorefinery,
(modelled on the US approach for using maize waste).

Popularity: 3% [?]

Indian oil firms eye land in Paraguay, Uruguay and Myanmar to grow crops

September 2nd, 2008 Posted in Agriculture, Commodities, India, Paraguay, Uruguay

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Money Matters – livemint.com

Some of the country’s top vegetable oil firms plan to lease or buy land in Paraguay, Uruguay and Myanmar to grow oilseeds and lentils as farmland shrinks in the South Asian nation, a top trade official said on Tuesday.

Despite being the world’s second biggest grower of rice and wheat and the leading importer of vegetable oils after China, India has recently been pinched by rising global food prices.
Policymakers fear climate change could squeeze the amount of land available to farmers even further.

“We have formed a consortium of 14 vegetable oil companies, which is in talks with the governments of Paraguay, Uruguay, and Myanmar for buying large tracts of land for cultivating soya bean, sunflower and pulses,” Ashok Sethia, president of the Solvent Extractors’ Association of India, said.

India consumes 18 million tonnes (mt) of lentils and imports from
Myanmar, Tanzania, Australia, Canada and Ukraine to bridge a shortfall
of about 4mt of the food.

It also imports almost half of the
11mt or so of edible oil it consumes, and buys palm oil from Malaysia
and Indonesia and soya oil from Brazil and Argentina.

Sethia said some importers were buying oil palm plantations in Indonesia, the world’s top palm oil producer.

“Growing
rice and wheat overseas does not seem feasible. Growing oilseeds and
lentils is. Do not be surprised to see more of this in the days to
come,” he said.

Popularity: 5% [?]

Oil, the 21st Century dot.com boom

September 2nd, 2008 Posted in China, Energy, India

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Any short-term falls in oil prices will be merely blips in a long, relentless upward trend.
Finance Week UK

“China today consumes as much crude oil per person as the US did in 1905, before mass production of the Model-C Ford and long before the advent of the jet engine,” points out Robin Batchelor, manager of BlackRock’s BGF World Energy fund. “If China and India were to increase their consumption per person to current US levels, these two countries alone would require 160 million barrels per day, more than twice the world’s supply of oil today.”

While, in theory, higher prices should dampen demand especially in emerging markets, this has so far failed to be the case. Russia’s demand remains healthy and car registrations are up around 60% year-on-year and show no sign of waning. On top of that Investec says 85% of global demand growth for oil over the next two years is from countries that are subsidising prices which includes the emerging giants of China, India and the Middle East. “China’s net subsidies are around $45bn a year (a figure which we believe is affordable). However, the two countries where we would question the sustainability of the subsidies on a long-term basis are Indonesia and India, although we would not expect India to reduce subsidies ahead of the election this year,” it adds.

Popularity: 4% [?]

Cost-Cutting in New York, but a Boom in India

September 2nd, 2008 Posted in Banking and Finance, India

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NYTimes.com

Cost-cutting in New York and London has already been brutal thus far this year, and there is more to come in the next few months. New York City financial firms expect to hand out some $18 billion less in pay and benefits this year than 2007, the largest one-year drop ever. Over all, United States banks will cut 200,000 employees by 2009, the banking consultancy Celent said in April.

The work these bankers were doing is not necessarily going away, though. Instead, jobs are popping up in places like India and Eastern Europe, often where healthier local markets exist.

In addition to moving some lower-level banking and research positions to support bankers and analysts in New York and London, firms are shipping some of their top bankers from those cities to faster-growing developing markets to handle clients there.

Wall Street banks started cautiously sending research jobs to India a few years ago, hiring employees by the handful and running pilot programs with firms like Copal, Office Tiger, Pipal Research and Tata Consultancy Services.

In 2003, JPMorgan and Morgan Stanley said they planned to move a few dozen research jobs to Mumbai, Lehman Brothers was working on a pilot program to create research presentations in India and both Merrill Lynch and Goldman Sachs said they had not moved any research to the country.

Five years later, the trickle is a flood. Third-party firms say they are seeing a 20 to 40 percent upswing in business this year alone.

Morgan Stanley has about 500 people employed in India doing research and statistical analysis. About 100 of Goldman Sachs’ 3,000 employees in Bangalore are working on investment research.

JPMorgan has 200 analysts in Mumbai working for its investment banking operations around the world, doing industry analysis, and compiling data and charts for marketing materials. It has an additional 125 analysts in Mumbai supporting the bank’s global research division.

Citigroup employs about 22,000 people in India, several hundred of whom work in investment research. Deutsche Bank has 6,000 employees in India, according to the bank’s Web site. Deutsche started a pilot program to outsource some research in 2003, and would not provide any update.

Theoretically, as much as 40 percent of the research-related jobs on Wall Street, tens of thousands of jobs, could be sent off-shore, said Deloitte’s Mr. Power, though the reality will be less than that.

Popularity: 1% [?]

U.S. Credit crunch ‘echoes Latin debt crisis’

September 2nd, 2008 Posted in Banking and Finance, Latin America, Public Policy, United States

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Reading Minister Velasco’s comments reminded me of a statement made by Nouriel Roubini, as part of an NYT profile on him, a couple of weeks ago – “that the US looked like the biggest emerging market of them all“!! That movie ending that Latin America knows “full well” is scary – hyperinflation, capital flight, currency controls, and ultimately the destruction of the middle class.
FT.com / World

US financial regulators are making the same mistakes as their Latin American equivalents in the debt crisis of the early 1980s, according to Andrés Velasco, Chile’s finance minister.

Public guarantees for private financial activities had to be coupled with strong regulation, he said, while regulators and credit ratings agencies should have been more vigilant about the risks associated with new financial instruments.

“You learn the hard way,” Mr Velasco told the Financial Times. “This is a more modern and a much bigger version of what we have seen in emerging markets over the last couple of decades.

“The US has made, on a different scale of course, some of the same mistakes Latin America made two decades ago. The US [is living] through [the] movie whose end in Latin America we know full well.”

Popularity: 4% [?]