PDF: 2962 pages, 5.2 MB - Bay Area Council Economic Institute

6
Cross-Border Exchanges Flourish
“There is a new American who could come from anywhere, have an American idea of risk-taking and
self-reliance, and live anywhere he or she wants to. And if you can live where you want to, the
Bay Area is one of the best places in the world. It’s London, New York, or here. Because this place is
so focused on results and people have the opportunity to be creative, it draws people with different
backgrounds. The Indian diaspora here is one aspect of that. Because Indians were so successful in
the Bay Area, others followed. Every generation of Indians here builds on a reservoir of goodwill
and understanding.”
Madhav Misra, Chairman, Misra Capital Management
Co-Chairman, San Francisco-Bangalore Sister City Committee
S
ince the 1990s, and in some cases much earlier, Northern California companies have established
significant footholds in India—initially for cost arbitrage but later as part of a broader, global
value proposition. And increasingly, Indian firms are arriving in the Bay Area to establish corporate
and representative offices, access Silicon Valley technology, serve a huge local Indian market, collaborate
with university research facilities, and connect with regional legal and financial expertise.
Tracking these exchanges typically involves mainly anecdotal and secondary research, rather than
statistics which, when available, are often unreliable. As with its past country reports, the Bay Area
Council Economic Institute does not attempt here to provide a comprehensive picture of the twoway
commercial flow between the Bay Area and India, but instead uses selected examples of company
activities in key regional industry sectors to illustrate the types of ongoing trends and exchanges
taking place.
The industries we have chosen to highlight in this section include:
A. Banking/Financial Services
B. Legal Services
C. Semiconductors
D. Software/IT Services/Business Process Outsourcing
E. Architecture/Planning
F. Energy/Environment/Clean Technology
G. Computing/Networking/Internet
H. Biotech/Biopharma
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