In a nation where the mechanical engineering industry is the largest employer, nothing excites more than the prospect of getting wired to “Asia and her great markets”. To captains of the Finnish industry, India embodies all that China isn’t — a land where people speak and do business in English, where democracy is in the DNA, where a strong legal redressal system can assure fair play. Yet there’s something about India that’s irritating and worrying, prompting comparisons with China.

Last week, when his company announced it was going to invest 5 million euros in its existing plant in Khopoli near Mumbai to manufacture controllable pitch propellers for ships, Wartsila Corp president and CEO Ole Johansson didn’t exactly party. “In India, there’s too much talk, very less gets done on the ground,” he told a group of visiting Indian journalists. “Though it’s not correct to draw comparisons, you have to admit that there is decisiveness in China. Even the infrastructure is there. In India, you still have the famous red-tape, a taxation policy that’s not very supportive. What India has to realise is that the world is running, and running away...India has to move.”

Johansson should know. Wartsila, which is into ship power, services and power plants, was one of the first Finnish companies to enter India in the early 1980s. India will be its third production unit for controllable pitch propellers, after the Netherlands and Norway. In China, Wartsila is already manufacturing fixed pitch propellers.

Johansson’s concerns are shared by others in the industry who are counting on Indian markets. The total volume of trade between Finland and India is very low — it was just 490 million euros in 2006, with Finnish exports accounting for 330 million euros. Though India became its fifth largest trading partner in Asia in 2005, trade was less than 1 per cent of Finland’s total foreign trade. But this is where Finnish companies hope to make a difference.

... contd.