Leveraging Sports to Sell Cement?

When Parth Jindal ’12 took the leadership of JSW group, his dad’s cement and paint conglomerate in India, he came up with an unusual scheme to put the company on the same level of brand awareness as building material titans including Tata and Birlas. A lifelong sportsman who played squash at Brown, he proposed a plan to make JSW synonymous with Indian excellence in Olympic sports.

“I told my board, ‘If we could own that space, we could lift the entire brand,’” he says. It wasn’t an easy sell. ‘The board asked, ‘Isn’t that the government’s job?’ So I framed the idea as an investment both in India’s image and in JSW’s.”

Today the portfolio of JSW Sports includes cricket team Delhi Capitals and football (soccer) team Bengaluru FC and it runs the Inspire Institute of Sport (IIS), India’s first private Olympic training facility. The investment has paid off: During the 2020 Tokyo Olympics, IIS athletes won three of India’s seven medals, and during the 2024 Paris Olympics, they won four. Jindal’s goal for the L.A. Olympics in 2028? For IIS athletes to win five, with Indian athletes overall winning ten.

JSW was losing money when Jindal started 9 years ago. In August 2025, he successfully took the company public. And Jindal thinks his JSW-sports marriage will likewise ride a wave of success. “Globally, sport accounts for four to five percent of GDP, but in India, it’s barely one percent, and that’s mostly cricket. But as India’s middle class grows, sport will boom,” he says, yielding stadiums, merchandise, memorabilia and tourism. “We could see eight times the growth in the next ten to fifteen years.”