NEW DELHI: A quarter century ago, a Goldman Sachs economist coined a four-letter acronym to describe four fast growing emerging economies and tried to rhyme it with 'brick' to indicate their strength and longevity and named his research paper 'Building Better Global Economic BRICs'.
This acronym soon started catching the attention of the world brick-by-brick, and this new term, 'BRIC', joined the investing lexicon to describe the quartet of Brazil, Russia, India and China as future drivers of global economic growth.
It grew in size as well — to five with the inclusion of South Africa in 2010, renamed 'BRICS' — and has eleven member-countries now. The leaders, however, decided to continue with the five-letter name for this multi-nation bloc.
Interestingly, the first government-level meeting of this bloc in 2006 focused a lot on the situation surrounding Iran and the Middle East. Now, two decades later, Iran will again be a key point of discussion when the leaders meet here for the BRICS Summit 2026 this weekend. Besides, Iran itself is now a member of this grouping, and its President Masoud Pezeshkian is attending the Summit.
Egypt, Ethiopia, Iran, Saudi Arabia and the UAE became full members of BRICS in 2024 and Indonesia in January 2025.
Besides, Belarus, Bolivia, Kazakhstan, Cuba, Malaysia, Nigeria, Thailand, Uganda, Uzbekistan and Vietnam joined BRICS as Partner Countries last year.
As a multi-nation bloc, BRIC was formalised at the first meeting of BRIC foreign ministers on the sidelines of the United Nations General Assembly (UNGA) in New York in 2006.
The inaugural BRIC Summit of the heads of states or governments of the four countries was convened in Yekaterinburg, Russia, in 2009. It was attended by the then Indian Prime Minister Manmohan Singh, Russia's Dmitry Medvedev, Hu Jintao from China and Brazil's President Luiz Inacio Lula da Silva.
While Lula remains the only one from the original four to still hold the office, he is unlikely to attend the September 12-13 summit and is expected to be represented by his foreign minister.
In the decade before these summits began in 2009, the world was keenly watching how the growth of emerging economies was outpacing that of the developed world for the first time.
It was this trend that led to Jim O'Neill, then head of Global Economic Research at Goldman Sachs, prepare a research paper focussed on the four fast growing emerging market countries as key drivers of future global economic growth.
He argued in the paper that the "weight of the BRICs" in the world economy would grow significantly over the next 10 years and also called for adjusting the G7 bloc to incorporate BRIC representation.
More research papers followed in the coming years, including one from Goldman Sachs in 2003, titled 'Dreaming with BRICs: The Path to 2050', which projected BRICs possibly overtaking the largest Western economies by 2039.
Soon, several BRIC-themed mutual funds, exchange-traded funds and indices were launched across the world markets.
In 2014, the bloc also announced BRICS Development Bank, which was later renamed the New Development Bank (NDB).
This time, the official theme for India's BRICS chairship and the 18th BRICS Summit is "building for resilience, innovation, cooperation and sustainability".