In these cases, acquisitions were specifically undertaken to attain global size and status, and to build new competitive  6  BIS central bankers’ speeches  advantages by combining the best international technology with low-cost Indian labour (Satyanand and Raghavendran, 2010). 5 Destinational investment trends Direction of outward FDI shows that it is getting more diversified across countries. Diverting from the past trend (i.e.
pre-1990s) when Indian companies were investing in countries where there was little technological competition, the more recent trend shows that Indian overseas investment is increasingly flowing to developed economies (Table 4), partly reflecting growing confidence of the Indian corporates and availability of overseas assets at competitive rates.