Earlier, we looked at how Indian equity markets are structured and how a large part of the index is concentrated in financial services, IT, and consumption.

There is nothing unusual about that. Markets tend to reflect the stage of development of the economy they represent. 

India is still expanding its credit system, building infrastructure, and growing consumption. Naturally, those sectors dominate the listed universe.

But now consider a slightly different question.

What are the industries that are shaping the next phase of the global economy? And more importantly, where are those companies listed?

Take semiconductors as an example.

Semiconductors sit at the heart of modern technology. Every smartphone, data centre, electric vehicle, artificial intelligence system, and advanced defence technology depends on increasingly sophisticated chips. As computing power grows and digital infrastructure expands, the importance of this industry only increases.

Yet India does not currently have a publicly listed company manufacturing leading-edge semiconductor chips.

Now look at the scale of this industry globally.

NVIDIA, one of the companies building the computing infrastructure for artificial intelligence, crossed $4 trillion in market capitalisation in 2025. 

Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Company (TSMC), the world’s largest contract chip manufacturer, is valued at well over $1.7 trillion. 

The semiconductor industry itself generates more than $1 trillion in annual revenue globally, and demand continues to grow as artificial intelligence and high-performance computing expand.

For an investor building a purely domestic equity portfolio, this entire ecosystem is largely inaccessible.

A similar situation is for the biotechnology sector.

Biotechnology companies operate at the frontier of medical research. They develop new drugs, genetic therapies, and advanced treatments that often take years of scientific work and billions of dollars of investment before reaching patients.

One recent example many people may have heard about is Ozempic, a diabetes and weight-management drug developed by Novo Nordisk. The medicine became so widely used globally that its sales alone crossed around $18 billion in 2025, with demand continuing to grow rapidly.

To put that into perspective, the revenue generated by a single innovative drug can rival the annual sales of some large pharmaceutical companies.

India certainly has strong pharmaceutical companies, and many of them are global leaders in generic drug manufacturing and contract research. Companies like Sun Pharma, Dr. Reddy’s, and Cipla have built significant international businesses.

But large research-driven biotechnology platforms, the kind of companies spending billions to discover entirely new biological medicines are still limited in Indian public markets.

So even when an Indian investor holds a diversified portfolio across sectors domestically, certain areas of cutting-edge medical innovation may still remain outside that opportunity set.

This is not a weakness of Indian markets. It simply reflects where different industries have historically developed and where capital markets have supported large-scale scientific research and drug discovery.