India Inc’s overseas buying spree tops $18bn, driven by strategy

India Inc’s overseas buying spree has crossed $18bn, and the pattern now looks less like vanity shopping for global trophies than a hard-nosed search for scale, technology and market access. Grant Thornton said 162 Indian companies spent more than $18bn on outbound acquisitions in 2025, a 34% jump from the previous year, with a late-April 2026 deal by Sun Pharmaceuticals setting the tone for a new phase of cross-border ambition.

Sun Pharma agreed to pay $11.75bn for New York-listed Organon & Co., a women’s health and biosimilars business, in what was described as the biggest overseas acquisition by an Indian company in nearly two decades. The transaction followed a string of other large bets: Tata Motors agreed to buy Turin-based Iveco for $4.4bn, Coforge agreed to purchase Silicon Valley-based Encora for $2.35bn, and the Bajaj Group bought a 23% stake in Allianz SE earlier in 2026. Together, the deals show Indian boardrooms reaching for assets that can deepen product lines, widen distribution and speed up capability-building far beyond the domestic market.

That motive matters because the backdrop is very different from the last great overseas-buying wave in the early 2000s, when the Tata Group made audacious purchases such as Jaguar Land Rover and Corus Steel. Then, India was riding a roaring bull market. Now, the country is dealing with a sharp exodus of foreign portfolio investors, weak net foreign direct investment and stubbornly soft private investment at home, despite tax cuts and production-linked subsidies from the government. V Anantha Nageswaran, India’s chief economic adviser, has said corporate profits at the country’s top 500 companies have grown 30.8% a year since Covid, but private-sector capital formation has remained disappointing.

That disconnect helps explain why some executives are looking overseas for greenfield factories and strategic assets. Saurabh Mukherjea of Marcellus Investment Managers has said there is plenty of Indian money heading abroad, and that companies see better access to industrial land and working capital in the United States and other markets. The implication for India is stark: capital is still being deployed, but not always at home, which could leave domestic investment, jobs and supplier ecosystems short of the scale the government wants.

The broader deal data points to the same shift. LSEG said outbound acquisitions reached $18bn in the first nine months of 2025, a more than decade-high and over 240% higher year on year. EY said India’s total deal value rose to $123.8bn in 2025, while cross-border M&A jumped 155% to $33.2bn, with December 2025 the peak month for cross-border value flows. France was the most active foreign acquirer in India, while Italy was the top destination for Indian outbound deals. The Reserve Bank of India’s overseas investment releases for January through April 2026 suggest the outward push is still being tracked closely, and India’s next phase of dealmaking may define whether its firms remain buyers of foreign assets, or become global consolidators in their own right.