The total retail market is expected to touch $590 billion by 2011.
The personal care category has a 5 per cent wallet share in the Indian retail market.
Footwear is expected to become a $1 billion market in India by 2011.
Consumer durables and IT products should touch $35 billion by 2011.
The jewelry and watches category is expected to have a 5 per cent wallet share by 2011.
NUGGETS
Selections from management journals
While consumers across the world are seeing a growing number of “Made in India” labels on the goods they buy, Indian shoppers are witnessing a more subtle change. Increasingly, multinational companies are selling products that are not just made in — but that are made for — India.
Entire generations of Indian consumers, who once felt grateful simply for being able to experience the same brands as the rest of the world, are now realising they can ask for products that cater to their wants and needs. Several multinationals have responded with varying degrees of success, but experts agree that customising products for the world’s third-largest market is a necessary investment.
Made for India: Succeeding in a market where one size won’t fit all
India Knowledge@Wharton
March 13-26
Read this article at http://knowledge.wharton.upenn.edu/india/
There’s a reason companies fear experimenting with the sales force: It is the engine that drives revenue. No matter how patched up or spluttering that engine may be, the thought of overhauling it fills senior executives with dread. To keep sales flowing, companies will make piecemeal ongoing repairs as long as they can. Yet extraordinary economic times force companies to take every opportunity to cut costs and arrest declining revenues and margins.
Unfortunately, fear and the belief that it isn’t possible to be both fast and precise often result in two common mistakes: Trimming only back-office staff and functions or instituting across-the-board cost cuts that include frontline sales reps. It’s crucial to determine where cuts will hurt customer perceptions and affect their buying behaviour; otherwise, important investments will be eliminated while low-value ones survive.
Cutting sales costs, not revenues
By Anupam Agarwal, Eric Harmon and Michael Viertle
The McKinsey Quarterly, March 2009
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The global downturn’s speed and severity have significant implications for the supply chains of global manufacturers. Among steelmakers, chemical players and some high-tech companies, for instance, order books — and therefore prices — are under tremendous pressure. Volatility wreaks havoc on traditional supply chain planning: The process for determining production levels, raw-material purchases, transport capacity, and other vital factors, largely by examining historical patterns of demand. “Every month, we produce a rolling three-year plan,” said one metals executive recently, “but right now I can’t see even three weeks ahead.”
Against this backdrop, senior executives should reconsider the implications of the “bullwhip effect,” first identified in the 1960s and known to generations of business students as the “beer game.” In this classic phenomenon, distortions in information snowball along the length of a company’s supply chain, propelling relatively small changes.
Building a flexible supply chain for uncertain times
By Christoph Glatzel, Stefan Helmcke and Joshua Wine
The McKinsey Quarterly, March 2009
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Researchers disagree about the critical drivers of success in and efficiency of high-tech markets. Some researchers assert that high-tech markets are efficient with best-quality brands being dominant, and others suspect that network effects lead to perverse markets in which the dominant brands do not have the best quality. Empirical analysis of historical data on 19 categories shows that though both quality and network effects affect market share flows, in general markets are efficient. Network effects enhance the positive effect of quality.
Does quality win? Network effects versus quality in high-tech markets
By Gerard J Tellis, Eden Yin and Rakesh Niraj
Journal of Marketing Research, April 2009
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