'India will learn to manufacture faster'

India will learn to manufacture faster than China as global corporations as well as local companies are showing interest in producing goods locally, according to a research report released by Centre for Knowledge Societies (CKS), a Bangalore-based innovation consulting company.

Aditya Dev Sood, Founder and CEO, CKS, said: "At present, we can see Chinese goods flooding the world market. But they are goods manufactured for a different brand and not a Chinese brand. In India's case, it is different. The Indian brands are evolving in the manufacturing sector. This apart, India is producing sophisticated managerial talent, which China has failed to achieve. The ecosystem for manufacturing is growing in India."

According to him, China emerges from this study as the world's factory. "Chinese artifacts are replacing locally manufactured goods as far away as Egypt and Brazil.

On the other hand, India's competitive edge resides in its ability to harness strategic consumer data and apply them in its key business sectors impacting global business practices," he added.

'The Emerging Economy Report', prepared by CKS, focuses on seven countries: India, China, Indonesia, South Africa, Kenya, Egypt and Brazil. These key regions of the world, the report claims, are "experiencing informationalisation under conditions of limited or partial industrialisation."

Sood pointed out that information was gradually replacing Industrialism: "Strong and sustained employment growth is seen in the service sector, while the manufacturing sector sees variable change. We see that in Brazil, where at 64 per cent, the largest share of Brazil's GDP comes from the service sector while the industrial sector contributes only half of that at 30.8 per cent," he said.

In many emerging economy environments, especially in rural areas, soft infrastructure is encountered even in the absence of hard infrastructure.

"More importantly, the installation and use of soft infrastructure can generate and attract the capital resources necessary to build the more expensive hard infrastructure. For instance, Egypt's population enjoys a substantially high mobile coverage at 87 per cent while 29 per cent of its villages still have no access to safe drinking water," he said.

Sood said informal economies are becoming networked economies: "Large informal markets for intellectual property continue to coexist with newly organised corporate retail outlets, as each caters to different consumer segments. Where once only large corporations enjoyed sophisticated long distance access, even micro-enterprises can now be connected to one another," he stated.