About the book
What The Cartel covers, how it is organised, and who wrote it.
What the book is
The Cartel is a practitioner's manual for building an import and export business out of India. It is written for people who want to start trading across borders, for early-stage operators, for NRIs importing from India, and for services exporters. Chapters are short and dense. Each one is built around decisions and worked numbers, and each closes on a checklist of actions.
The book is in three parts and thirty-two chapters.
Part I, The Big Picture (chapters 1 to 11) surveys the market: why trade matters now, what India sells and buys, and how to read the global board. It then goes through the world one region at a time.
Part II, The Core Play (chapters 12 to 23) is for the person making the commercial decisions: what to sell, where to source it, who to sell it to, how to cost it, how to close the deal, and how to cover the risk.
Part III, The Practitioner's Toolkit (chapters 24 to 32) is for whoever runs the operation day to day: product codes, registrations, shipping, customs paperwork, getting paid, structuring the business, and the systems and plan that keep it running.
Recurring devices mark the pages: Decision Frameworks, Cartel Benchmarks and Grey Zone boxes. The book also comes with a downloadable Toolkit of working models and templates, which this site distributes.
The author
An investment banker with over fifteen years of experience in M&A and international trade consulting, Sarthak Ahuja is a Gold Medalist from the Indian School of Business and the bestselling author of three books: The Money Ball, Founder's Office, and Daily Coffee & Startup Fundraising.
The youngest Indian to hold four qualifications, in CA, CS, CMA, and a degree in finance, he practices in corporate finance, transaction advisory, and international entity structuring, and his firm advises companies on international market entry and exports.
Followed by over five million people, with more than a hundred million monthly views, he is a visiting faculty at institutions including the Indian School of Business, and has spoken at the Harvard Sustainability Summit, the Warwick India Summit, Davos 2026, and the House of Lords in London on economics, finance, and international trade.
This is his fourth book.
Editor and publisher
Edited by Amlan Chakravarty.
Published by Wyzr, a nonfiction publisher founded in 2022 that works with founders, investors, educators and organisations on books that Indian experts want to write. Readers can write to hello@wyzr.in.