MUMBAI: WPP chief executive officer Martin Sorrell is bullish about India’s economy. He believes the GST switchover pangs and demonetisation were only temporary hiccups.

Lauding India’s growth rate, Sorrell mentioned that India continued to remain among the fastest growing economies of the world, the Economic Times reported. When one had legislative change which brought about significant social change, it would lead to disruption. That was short-term pain for long-term gain, he said.

Sorrell, who was in India yesterday to attend the company’s first board meeting, announced the appointment of CVL Srinivas as the new country head. He also hinted that GroupM, which is a part of WPP network, was seek good acquisitions.

Sorrell said he did not believe internet companies such as Facebook and Google were particularly technology companies. They were media companies but took the position publicly as technology companies, which was wrong. He also shared that Facebook hired 4000 employees for its editorial content and social media companies should take responsibility of the content they put out.

He said he believed the technology companies had to take responsibility of their contents appearing on extremist sites or whatever happened to be -- about consumer brands, safety, about transparency, about fraud, about bots, about fake news, all those issues, he added.

About characterising what the world was beyond India, he said, it was not growing at six per cent or 5.7 per cent. People would give their eye, teeth, they would cut off their limbs to grow at that sort of rate. The world, he said, was growing at around three to four per cent.

The UK would be lucky if it grew at a couple of percents. In the US, President Trump would like to see the growth at four per cent, he concluded.