India's largest company, Indian Oil Corporation, needs to accelerate its new business plans to avoid becoming obsolete
Sometime in the third week of November last year, a rather incongruous bit of news found its way into the papers. Indian Oil Corporation (IOC) made public its intention to get into nuclear power. It is another matter altogether that the significance was lost in the barrage of information we’re pounded with everyday. For a moment though, look at the news from a different perspective. With revenues in the region of $63 billion, IOC is India’s single largest company. It controls half the country’s market for petroleum products. Its closest competitor in India, Reliance Industries (RIL), with revenues close to $32 billion, is half IOC’s size. But these numbers don’t reveal the whole truth. Dig a shade deeper and the numbers reveal an altogether different story.
(This story appears in the 22 January, 2010 issue of Forbes India. To visit our Archives, click here.)