BusinessofCleantech
The BusinessofCleantech is a blog which I started in March with the idea of promoting thoughts, conversation and news around the Cleantech Domain and the role of startups. This was March and then.....we all know what happened.
Day after day we went through depressing news of the new virus which was spreading like Wildfire across countries, continents, mountains, deserts, cities and villages. For a moment it seemed that the virus knew had no memory it just attacked everything and everyone in its space. There were no playbooks to go by. What worked in one country was tried in every other. Scientists, Universities and researchers scrambled to understand the virus, work on vaccines. Someone said that the last time the world was united against a common enemy was 1945. Poignant as it may sound every country in the world has seen health and economic destruction. Even countries which have been unscathed have seen their impact due to the interconnected nature of the world and economies.
People couldn't leave homes, they couldn't go to work, people lost jobs, incomes and livelihoods . Export markets shut down and supplier countries got impacted as factories shut. Truly the world has changed and how......
We had tried to predict a few things when the lockdown started and its time to revisit them and once again do the crystal gazing and see how startups get affected
- Investment in Healthcare - Crisis brings about an opportunity to reform and reinvigorate systems. Even in India we have seen attempts being made to reform certain aspects of our Healthcare infrastructure, policy and delivery. In India the Telemedicine Guidelines were issued by the Ministry of Health and it is a first step in digitilization of the Health Care delivery system. However challenges still remain in terms of affordability of Healthcare and a lot of work needs to be done by the Manufacturing sector in ensuring access to Quality Healthcare products at scale and the Pharmaceutical industry in producing medicines and vaccines at scale.
- Globalization - I had predicted that globalization will be hit, as countries will become more insular. The jury is still out, but the need for a rule based trading framework is more relevant today than ever. In the Cleantech and Startup sector we would see investments happening in input sectors creating various eco-systems. The PLI scheme for mobile phones will create lots of requirements for ancillary components which hopefully will scale. Lets hope we can replicate the success of a global production hub in Auto in other sectors and young startups can play a crucial role
- Social Impact - One thing that stood out in the lockdown is companies got separated based on how you treated your employees. Companies who took care of their employees, without necessarily resorting to layoffs, will benefit when the economy recovers. We saw how many entrepreneurs worked with their employees to take temporary cuts in order to conserve cash, and are ready to start back as businesses come back online
- ESG - I was hoping that ESG will not go off the agenda and from all that I hear in the global financial markets, financiers are even more eager to ensure that their funds are deployed in companies with strong ESG compliance. As I said in one of my previous articles curve of Climate Change is also another curve that needs to be flattened
- Startups - Frankly I think all of us who are in the startup space, have done whatever we could to manage ourselves in this scenario. However as they say there is never a bad time in the startup space. Keep your costs low, reduce overheads and focus on revenues. Those who survive will be reaping the benefits of reduced competition when the markets recover
I was not writing for the last 3 months. Apart from the stress and strain of navigating the new normal world of Work from Home ( WFH), I too decided to slow down my life, refocus on myself and re calibrate my life. I will try to be more regular and learn from the last 4 months on how we must look at life from a new lens altogether