Q: Where do you see potential for collaboration between Indian and Scottish companies?
Scotland has competitive global advantage in six sectors — life sciences and pharma, financial services, advance engineering, tourism, oil & gas and renewable sources of energy. Of these, life sciences and pharma, financial services, engineering and renewable sources of energy are important from India's point of view.
Q: Why would Indian companies invest in Scotland?
Businessmen make investment decisions on hard facts of good business environment, ease of doing business, high quality workforce and a culture of good private-public partnerships. We have all of these. Besides, our stress is on quality — quality projects with quality companies leading to high-value jobs. Scotland's strength is in research and development, something that is borne out by the fact that 25 per cent of the country's investment is in R&D. In fact, Scotland has recently been named as the Region of the Future 2008 by the Financial Times FDI magazine, beating 38 other European regions for the title.
Q: Is there scope for collaboration in the financial services sector?
Financial services sector is very important in Scotland. Glasgow and Edinburgh are among Europe's leading financial centres, ranked next only to London. We have big banks and one of the top six banks in Europe is in Scotland.
Indian companies are already collaborating with financial services companies in Scotland in fields such as software and product development, IT supply chain and high-level back-end operations.
Q: What is Scotland's strength in renewable sources of energy?
Our strongest area is wind energy. There is high-level research being carried out in wind energy and the Scottish government has set targets to use renewable sources of energy in various applications. Wind and wave energies are very important. Scottish companies have developed excellent techno-logy in tapping wind energy and can sell the know-how to the world. In fact, island economies have a huge potential in tapping wind energy. A number of countries including Japan, Spain and the US have shown interest. India also has a strong track record in renewables. It could use wind energy for generating electricity. Scotland has excess capacity and can export the stored wind energy.
Q: How do you compare India with China in terms of investment environment?
India lacks in infrastructure. It doesn't have physical infrastructure, but in India one is struck by the presence of a lot of globally competitive companies. Besides, India and Scotland have commonalities in work ethics handed down by the British.
