India is Blackstone Inc’s best investment market in the world, said the company’s Chief Executive Officer Stephen Schwarzman during an an interaction with the media in Mumbai on Wednesday.
“We have enormous confidence in the country and in our own people, ” he said, adding, “Blackstone did not have any rigid amount of asset allocation for India, but we’re quite open to how much money we would put here.”
The world’s largest alternate asset manager with over $1 trillion in global assets, is looking to double its India exposure to $100 billion over the next few years, as it steps up its investments in the country while also seeing appreciation in its investment portfolio.
It is currently raising around $10 billion in an Asia-focused private equity fund and a significant chunk of that will be finding its way into India, Blackstone officials said. On the anvil is also an infrastructure fund, which will also be used to invest in India’s infrastructure segments such as digital infrastructure including telecom towers, energy transition and transportation segments such as airports, roads, and ports.
“India needs infrastructure, and this is something, as an objective, we’d like to do. If we add other activities to what we’re already doing and look at where we’d be in the near future, I think we’d all be very surprised at the scale of what we’re doing,” Schwarzman said.
“The prospect of the United States imposing tariffs should not worry India because I think India is quite well placed. Prime Minister Modi had a very good meeting with the President. They agreed to a trade agreement. There are very few countries in the world who have that treatment. And India has already made some changes to higher tariff issues.”
“And I would anticipate that the negotiations… I’m not conducting them, so I’m just anticipating that this should go relatively well,” he added.
Credit space
Another area where Blackstone is keen to enter India is in the private credit space. “We have a business in credit that has $450 billion in assets under management. We think over time that it’s very logical to bring it here,” Schwarzman said.