Iran not Indian corporates’ top priorities days ahead of attack

Leaders of corporate India did not mention Iran more than once in the run up to the, February 28 U.S.-Israel attack on Iran, while speaking at a conference organised in the past week, according to The Hindu’s analysis of the report that summarised proceedings of the conference.

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Kotak Institutional Equities (KIE) last month conducted an annual corporate conference “Chasing Growth 2026” which included the executives of India’s top listed companies.

The week-long event began with two day speaker sessions in which MDs and CEOs of top companies spoke about the prevailing business and economic climate, after which there were closed door sessions on different sectors. 

In the research report which summarised the speeches of top executives of the participating companies, Iran was mentioned only once and was not part of the 100 most used words of over 7000 words that were analysed. The analysis removed common English words, business jargon, and names of companies among others. Words that can be commonly related to the West Asian conflict like war, conflict, tension were found to be mentioned less than ten times in the summarised version of all the proceedings in the first two days, for which the documents are available.

Words relating to economic effects of the war were much more frequent like inflation, which was mentioned 27 times and depreciation mentioned eight times. Most of them were not found in the top 100 most used words. Moreover words like growth, strong, capex, expansion were found to be among the top 20 most used words, with the word “growth” appearing over 500 times in the document. 

While all this may have seemed “unpredictable” like many analysts and commentators put it, U.S. President Donald Trump had already given indications of such an attack in late January and mid-February. American ships were reportedly being stationed closer to Iran. Further, Turkey’s Foreign Minister Hakan Fidan reportedly said that “Israel was trying to persuade the US to launch a military attack on Iran,” after meeting with his Iranian counterpart Abbas Araghchi.

Indian stock indices which caught the signals on time, were down 1.4% after crude prices started increasing on 18, February. Oil prices are escalating at a rate faster than, two months ago. Early detection of the potential of attacks in West Asia could help corporate India hedge their net profit from being hit. As crude oil futures have now gone past $90, with Strait of Hormuz closed, analysts have started predicting a possible oil supply shock. Despite Indian government measures to look for alternative sources of buying and methods of transporting oil, the cost of these efforts including war insurance premiums would keep prices elevated, analysts said. 

Speaking in a media briefing a senior executive at KIE had also expressed his “surprise” regarding the absence of Iran in the conversation. This may indicate the lack of preparedness by corporate India for an event that has now destabilised the entire world and furling commodity prices. 

To be sure, the analysis gives a feeler of the mood of corporate India and is not an accurate representation of what the thoughts were. The analysis was done based on information from KIE provided data made available in the public domain.