WASHINGTON: Ahead of his visit to India, US Secretary of State Mike Pompeo has learned that he had a “tough” time as a businessman in Chennai and Bengaluru while seeking to sell machine elements for the aerospace enterprise in the U.S.
Pompeo stated this during his Wednesday address to a Washington target market that included Google’s Indian-American CEO Sundar Pichai and top corporate executives from India and the US at the India Ideas Summit.
Pompeo will tour India, Sri Lanka, Japan, and South Korea from June 24 to 30.
Responding to a question, Pompeo said that as a businessman, earlier than he ran for the Congress, he had spent some time in Chennai and Bangalore to promote products to the Hindustan Aeronautics Limited (HAL), India’s leading public area aerospace and defense corporation.
“I failed to tell the story – I did commercial enterprise in India after I – earlier than I misplaced my thoughts and ran for Congress, I ran a small enterprise that made gadget components for the aerospace industry.
“And I spent an honest quantity of time in Bangalore and Chennai running with HAL – with Hindustan Aeronautics Limited – to promote products we – a small joint project,” the fifty-five-12 months-vintage Secretary of State said at the occasion hosted with the aid of the United States-India Business Council.
“I’ll let you know what. It turned into hard,” Pompeo advised the target audience.
Before joining the Trump Administration, Pompeo served in his fourth term as a congressman from Kansas’ 4th District.
Before his career in Congress, Pompeo founded Thayer Aerospace, where he served as CEO for over a decade. According to his profile on the USA Department of State website, he later became President of Sentry International, an oilfield device manufacturing, distribution, and carrier organization.
“India is still beginning up; it is still figuring its way through. However, there was an actual cost proposition there, and we did nicely,” he said, recalling his experience as a businessman in India.
“When I reflect onconsideration on that when I consider what groups want after they go to spend money on each different’s countries, they want stability, and they want a set of policies that they can recognize, they want to ensure that the efforts that we put forward together from America have sufficient bipartisanship, that they won’t be whipsawed, as we’ve got elections here,” he said.