Volume 14, Number 2 Article by P G Apte June, 2002
Financial Markets: The Way Ahead Interview With Naina Lal Kidwai :
Naina Lal Kidwai, Vice Chairman of J M Morgan Stanley India, one of the leading investment banks in the country, is a Chartered Accountant who went on to graduate from Harvard Business School, the first Indian woman to do so. Kidwai was ranked third among top businesswomen in Asia, and was included in the list of top 50 women internationally, by Fortune magazine recently.
Fresh from the successful launch of Bharti Televentures IPO of Rs 850 crore and the successful closure of the acquisition of VSNL by the Tatas, Kidwai talked shop with IIMB?s P G Apte the. The economy should be on its way back to health after the second quarter this year, and yes, the US economy could very well continue to drive the rest of the world, given its large pools of capital, Kidwai opined, discussing the policy and operational steps governments could take to accelerate recovery. She dwelt at length on mergers and acquisitions, which is emerging as a Morgan Stanley core competence, on whether M&As destroy value for the acquirer shareholders while creating value for the acquired company shareholders, and whether M&A activity flourishes only when the markets are booming, M&A activity in the IT sector and whether investement banking will merge into the financial supermarket. The government?s privatisation initiatives, the lacunae in the Indian capital markets and the vexed issue of capital account convertibility, whether the efficient market theory was giving way to a new school of ?behavioural economics?, were dealt with before Kidwai concluded with words of advice for those seeking careers in the finance and investment banking sectors.
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