China & India Rule the 2018 List of BRICS 100 Blue Ocean Entrepreneurs

Even as Brazil and South Africa appear to continue to stutter a little just as they did the past two years, the Indian and the Chinese growth stories seem to have picked the threads up back with a challenging vigor. The press-teaser on the 2018 Top BRICS100 Blue Ocean Entrepreneurs shows almost half the slots of the elite list hogged by Indian and Chinese entrepreneurs who've set the startup scene ablaze by their out-of-the-box business ventures. Though I don't yet have enough info to tell the whole story, I must definitely break the fact that among these 100 doyens, the dough shared breaches the USD 20 billion mark, and perhaps for the first time in the last half a decade, a fair many of the world's top entrepreneurs on any list are proven bootstrappers. Is there a pointer that PE dependence is perhaps beginning to crack in a new era of startups? Well, the jury isn't out yet on this.

The Blue Ocean list, which is being released in the later part of February 2018 contains founders and co-founders of companies that picked up blue-ocean ideas and have triggered the birth of entirely new industry verticals that straddle value chains of cutting-edge technology spaces; high-breed knowledge; e-commerce and social media. While almost all of these blue ocean entrepreneurs have changed the way their customers do business, live and socialize, they've also experimented spanking new ways to stay afloat; junk the cash-burn theory of growth and established their own entire supply chain on their own.

Many of these toppers have started world-sized complex verticals all at once! Sample Ma Huateng of the wonder biz Tencent, or Liu Qiangdong of the amazing Amazon look-alike JD, or Rajiv Gupta of the incredible CredForce, the company that's leapt to being a world leader in credentialing. While Tencent shows Huateng's sharp vision of the future, it also brings back the age of the shogoshushas and conglomerates. Rajiv's smart globalization moves, on the other hand, have ensured CredForce expands across the world fast to spread its leadership in credentialing wide enough to become impossible to rival. Not to be forgotten, JD's sudden, sharp rise into a globe-sized e-commerce giant is a handiwork of groundbreaking growth hacks of founder Liu Qiangdong.

Some of these stunning entrepreneurs on the BRICS100 Blue Ocean list would be noted for carving out companies in spaces that the traditional giants and market leaders always thought was theirs for keeps. Take Dhiraj Rajaram of the exciting data science solution provider Mu Sigma for example, or Robin Li of Baidu, or Zhou Qunfei of Lens Technologies that's sending chill down the strong spines of the giant Japanese lens and panel makers. And then, there's Chanakya Hridaya of the revolutionary logistics outfit BlackBuck and Abhinandan Balasubramanian, whose Premier Futsal has almost invented a new variant of soccer, creating a brand new customer-franchise of Gen Y'ers in India.

Even as we await the BRICS100 List for details, we definitely hope the Brazilian and Russian entrepreneurial magic still retains in terms of the sheer power of the ideas, even though their numbers seem to have thinned out just that wee bit. Just hang in there for a more detailed analysis of the 2018 chartburners.

BRICS 100 Research NPC provides news research, content, reportage and analysis services on BRICS economies, business and global impact to a wide variety of business and non-business stakeholders. Our well-known products include BRICS 100 annual listings of startups, entrepreneurs and educators in the five BRICS nations.

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This release was published on openPR.