In late April 2026, India’s largest pharmaceutical company Sun Pharmaceuticals finalized a landmark $11.75 billion all-cash agreement to acquire Organon & Co, a New York-listed global leader in women’s health and biosimilars. The deal stands as the largest cross-border acquisition by an Indian firm in nearly 20 years, and it caps a months-long streak of high-profile international purchases by Indian companies that has experts calling it a new wave of global expansion.
This recent string of deals extends far beyond Sun Pharma’s mega-purchase. Earlier in 2025, automaker Tata Motors acquired Italy’s Turin-based Iveco for $4.4 billion, IT services provider Coforge purchased Silicon Valley-based artificial intelligence firm Encora for $2.35 billion, and the Bajaj Group secured a 23% stake in global insurance giant Allianz SE. Data from global advisory firm Grant Thornton reveals that 162 Indian firms spent a combined $18 billion on outbound acquisitions across 2025, marking a 34% jump in total deal value from the prior year. Sumeet Abrol, national leader and partner at Grant Thornton, projects that India could cross the $15 billion mark for outbound deal value in the first half of 2026 alone.
Many industry observers have drawn parallels between this current expansion push and the early 2000s buying spree that saw Tata Group snap up iconic global assets including Jaguar Land Rover and Corus Steel, in a moment of widespread Indian corporate global ambition. But analysts note that the motivations driving today’s deals differ sharply from those of two decades ago. Rather than chasing high-profile trophy assets as symbols of global status, modern Indian firms are pursuing international acquisitions for clear strategic and operational gains.
The broader economic context that frames this new wave is also drastically different from the early 2000s expansion. During the last acquisition boom, India was riding a booming domestic bull market that fueled corporate confidence. Today, the country faces a drastically different landscape: it is contending with large-scale outflows of foreign portfolio investment, a steep decline in net foreign direct inflows, and persistently stagnant private sector investment within the country, even after the Indian government rolled out major tax cuts and production-linked incentive subsidies to spur domestic spending.
V Anantha Nageswaran, India’s chief economic advisor, recently highlighted this disconnect at a national policy conference, noting that even after posting 30.8% annual profit growth among the country’s top 500 post-pandemic companies, private sector capital formation has remained far lower than policymakers expected. This gap between strong corporate balance sheets and lackluster domestic investment is a core driver of the outbound trend, experts say. Even as the government urges domestic firms to invest more at home, growing dissatisfaction with domestic operating conditions, paired with more attractive opportunities for diversification and capability building abroad, has pushed corporate leaders to look overseas.
Saurabh Mukherjea, founder of leading Indian asset manager Marcellus Investment Managers, told the BBC that billions in Indian corporate capital is already flowing across borders. “Even among the companies we hold in our portfolio, many are building greenfield factories in the US and other regions where industrial land is nearly free, and accessing working capital is far simpler than it is here,” he explained. This trend is not limited to India’s largest corporate conglomerates either. While the Sun Pharma deal and unconfirmed reports of Mukesh Ambani backing a $300 billion oil refinery project in Brownsville, Texas—announced by former U.S. President Donald Trump—grab headlines, Mukherjea notes that dozens of small and mid-sized Indian firms are making smaller acquisitions and greenfield investments across the globe.
Neha Singh, co-founder of data intelligence firm Tracxn, notes that this expansion is supported by far stronger corporate balance sheets and improved access to global capital markets than Indian firms had two decades ago. “Indian companies are increasingly looking overseas to access ready-made consumer markets, established global brands, cutting-edge technological capabilities, specialized R&D expertise, and mature distribution networks that would take decades to build from scratch organically,” she explained. The rising trend has also accelerated amid growing global trade volatility, as companies move to secure resilient supply chains amid rising geopolitical tensions and the increasing use of trade tariffs and supply chokepoints as geopolitical weapons.
Despite the momentum, outbound acquisitions still carry significant risks for Indian firms. Mukherjea points to Tata Steel’s decades-long struggle with its 2000s acquisition of Corus Steel, which became a persistent financial albatross that dragged on the company’s performance for years. A second notable risk, he adds, is the almost universal reliance on all-cash deal structures: even Sun Pharma’s $11.75 billion mega-deal was completed entirely in cash, leaving companies exposed to greater financial strain than share-based deals would offer.
Still, experts agree that this outbound wave is far from over. Mukherjea projects that the raft of new free trade agreements India has signed with the European Union, United Kingdom, Australia, and other major economies will accelerate the trend, leading to a flood of outbound deals as Indian firms build operational bases in Western markets in coming years. He adds that a generational shift is also at play: many next-generation leaders of Indian family conglomerates study and reside abroad, and have a growing incentive to hold assets in foreign currencies, particularly as the Indian rupee has consistently lost roughly 40% of its value against the U.S. dollar every decade.
For the Indian domestic economy, this expansion abroad is likely to be paired with continued selective caution on large domestic investments, Singh notes. The country remains stuck in a cycle of weak consumer demand and anaemic private investment, a trend that has been worsened by recent global energy price shocks and growing uncertainty over the impact of generative AI on India’s already tight domestic job market.
Abrol of Grant Thornton notes that it remains unclear whether India will surpass 2025’s $18 billion outbound deal total this year, amid ongoing geopolitical volatility that creates uncertainty for global dealmaking. Still, the long-term trajectory is clear: Indian companies are increasingly hedging against economic and policy uncertainty within Asia’s third-largest economy, even as the Indian government works to stem dollar outflows and attract new foreign capital to reignite the country’s domestic growth engine.