India Inc. is flying high. Not only over the Indian sky. Many Indian firms have slowly and surely embarked on the global path and lead to the emergence of the Indian multinational companies.

With each passing day, Indian businesses are acquiring companies abroad, becoming world-popular suppliers and are recruiting staff cutting across nationalities. While an Asian Paints is painting the world red, Tata is rolling out Indicas from Birmingham and Sundram Fasteners nails home the fact that the Indian company is an entity to be reckoned with.

Some instances:

• Tata Motors sells its passenger-car Indica in the UK through a marketing alliance with Rover and has acquired a Daewoo Commercial Vehicles unit giving it access to markets in Korea and China.
• Ranbaxy is the ninth largest generics company in the world. An impressive 76 percent of its revenues come from overseas.
• Dr Reddy's Laboratories became the first Asia Pacific pharmaceutical company outside Japan to list on the New York Stock Exchange in 2001.
• Asian Paints is among the 10 largest decorative paints makers in the world and has manufacturing facilities across 24 countries.
• Small auto components company Bharat Forge is now the world's second largest forgings maker. It became the world's second largest forgings manufacturer after acquiring Carl Dan Peddinghaus a German forgings company last year. Its workforce includes Japanese, German, American and Chinese people. It has 31 customers across the world and only 31 percent of its turnover comes from India.
• Essel Propack is the world's largest manufacturers of lamitubes - tubes used to package toothpaste. It has 17 plants spread across 11 countries and a turnover of Rs 609.2 crore for the year ended December 2003. The company commands a staggering 30 percent of the 12.8 billion-units global tubes market.
• About 80 percent of revenues for Tata Consultancy Services comes from outside India. This month, it raised Rs 54.2 billion ($1.17 billion) in Asia's second-biggest tech IPO this year and India's largest IPO ever.
• Infosys has 25,634 employees including 600 from 33 nationalities other than Indian. It has 30 marketing offices across the world and 26 global software development centres in the US, Canada, Australia, the UK and Japan.
• Sundram Fasteners is not merely a nuts and bolts company. It believes in thinking out of the box. Probably that is why it decided to acquire a plant in China. The plant in Jiaxin city in the Haiyan economic zone has ensured one fact: that its customers who were earlier buying Sundram products in Europe and the US, did not have to go far from home to access the product.