For 70 years, VanEck has built its reputation on a simple principle. Identify structural change early and then build disciplined investment vehicles to express it.

Early on, the firm's founder, John van Eck, had a high conviction belief in gold, right before one of the largest inflationary periods in modern history. He was right. We focused on emerging markets before they were institutionalized. We leaned into semiconductors well before AI became mainstream. The pattern is consistent. Recognize durable macro change, design intelligent exposure, execute with discipline. That brings us to today.

We believe that India represents one of the next biggest structural opportunities available to investors. One that demands a purpose-built vehicle designed to capture India's long-term opportunity for investors.

India's Long-Term Return Profile

So I think the best place to start is to really understand the exceptional equity returns from India over the past 10 or 20 years.

India's stock market returns really in US dollars have been remarkably close to those from the United States. And I look really over 5, 10, 20 years, which is head spinning in and of itself. So that's to say that very few other major markets even approach this level of performance. And that performance has not been driven by speculation or cyclicality, it's been driven by sustained compounding of real returns in both the case of the US and India.

And just to drill down into that, if the aggregate of companies in the index delivers return on equity or return on capital employed that exceeds GDP return, that excess return compounds up over time. You don't see that really anywhere else in the world at these kind of levels. Other markets tend to have cyclicality from commodities or from interest rates. Very rarely do you see this compounding structure as you do in the United States and India on the same broad level.

And that's really just persistent high returns on capital, reinvestment efficiency, and balance sheet strength. So in that respect, India and the United States do have something rare in global markets. And this is a culture of public enterprise discipline that compounds measurable shareholder returns over time and then results in durable equity performance, which ultimately reflects this corporate behavior.

Emerging Megatrends in India

So let's look ahead to, let's call it the next five to 10 years. India has the potential to remain one of the strongest sources of equity returns globally. And this isn't a short-term trade, and it's not a cyclical call. It's based on what we laid out as compounding structural returns as markets continue past trends of creating shareholder value. I mean, that's not to say that India won't underperform other major markets over shorter time horizons. It has over the past year for various reasons. But these should be seen as opportunities to add exposure.

So we continue to believe that India remains this long-term uncorrelated portfolio position as a core compounder, buy and hold. So now we have to add changes. India is changing really quickly. The emergence of three real mega trends. One is momentum from new and powerful reforms. Two is digital mass adoption. And three is massive public and private, hard and soft infrastructure.

These layered on deepening and expanding capital markets. These new drivers reinforce the old ones by adding an additional flywheel.

So basically this flywheel drives material productivity games, it eliminates corruption, and it's a huge catalyst for enterprise formation.

This effectively hopes to capture the successful new companies in early stages of the public market lives, as well as, be exposed to the future winners that are already in existence and in the large, mid, and small cap ranges.

Think of these in terms of what happened in the US, the framework essentially. It's a mashup of, I guess, post Reagan reform period and the post internet period in one and in fast forward. So at a country level, India represents domestically driven, self-reinforcing and relatively uncorrelated compounding return stream. This perspective is not unique to VanEck. You're starting to hear it pretty broadly.

It's not a trade. It's a structural compounding opportunity. But there's a catch, isn't there always? Investing in India going forward almost certainly requires a purpose-built solution, one that manages around the inevitable disruption of a lot of the large cap universe by the next generation of businesses born in the cloud, born in AI.

Why INDZ?

Now at this point in the conversation, you might be asking yourself, why would I want to invest in INDZ, the VanEck India Select ETF? First, we're trying to capture India's long-term equity market opportunity. Second, we're using a forward-looking process that tries to capture return drivers not reflected in traditional benchmarks. And finally, we're providing select exposure to India's highest quality companies across market caps.