Fortune India - January 2018

THE BEGINNING OF a year is traditionally a time to look ahead and plan for the next 365 days. It’s also a time to look back at the past year, to take stock, and to understand how events of the 12 months gone by will affect us in the year to come. THE BEGINNING OF a year is traditionally a time to look ahead and plan for the next 365 days. It’s also a time to look back at the past year, to take stock, and to understand how events of the 12 months gone by will affect us in the year to come.As the Fortune India 500 shows, there’s been steady growth despite strong headwinds. If anything, 2017 was the year of consolidations, when some companies cut their losses and others went cherry picking. Reports suggest that 2017 has been among the top years for M&A deals. There’s the mammoth State Bank of India merger, one of the last things on Arundhati Bhattacharya’s agenda before she retired; there’s the announcement that ONGC will be acquiring HPCL, creating an oil giant that could change the composition of the top 10 in the Fortune India 500. These are just the biggest moves of 2017, says deputy editor Ashish Gupta, who is convinced that if ever there was a single move that defined the year, it simply had to be consolidation. The numbers bear him out, but read all about that on page 48.Elsewhere, associate editor Pavan Lall examines the anatomy of a failure, the perils of hubris, or just the price of greed. Zicom, once a booming security solutions provider in India and West Asia, took some gambles and lost. We bring you the story of how the company plans to climb back, having learnt from experience.
This year promises to be as exciting as the one gone by. For one thing, it’s the last year before we hit elec-tion year, so I’m sure we’ll see a lot of action on the policy front. Politically and economically, it looks like it’s going to be quite a ride. So, buckle up! And keep reading, because we’ll bring you all the real stories of what’s happening in India Inc.