The income pyramid is hard to dig into

Is high growth inevitable for companies operating in under-penetrated sectors? Many of us implicitly assume as much, particularly investors when they indiscriminately invest in such companies despite expensive valuations. The logic behind this appears robust: Any extra expenditure for a household would have a different spending pattern from its current pattern; basic needs having already been taken care of, they should spend the extra rupees on new categories on which they spent too little.

But there appears to be no free lunch — at least none so far. Over the last decade and a half, revenue growth in most corporatised sectors