The Financial Express – December 30, 2008
In a previous column in this paper, I had suggested that what was more likely to upset our economy was, companies failing due to bankers’ reluctance to lend, than evaporating consumer demand. I had, perhaps naively, suggested that instead of the government spending good money to bail out consumer demand, they should spend it to incentivize banks to lend to those companies, which are otherwise fundamentally healthy, but suffering from a severe hangover, due to excessive expansion in boom time. This has elicited a sharp response from bankers who say they are not in the ‘bailing out’ business, and must evaluate lending risk even more stringently now than they did in the past. THAT IS A FAIR POINT; HOWEVER, THE RISK ASSESSMENT HAS TO BE SOPHISTICATED ENOUGH AND AT THE FIRM LEVEL SO THAT THE BABY IS NOT THROWN OUT WITH THE BATH WATER AND LONG TERM WINNERS HAVING A […]
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The Economic Times - July 28, 2008
After the last edition of this column about the human face of the economy, and its implications for economic policy, someone asked why a consumer markets person was writing about the economy now. That is exactly the point that was attempted to be made in my last column and re iterated again here – that The Economy is not just about invisible macro forces or numbers like exchange rates and indices of industrial or agricultural production; but that it is also about how different people or groups of people actually get affected, how they think about their situation, and the spending / saving / investment choices they make as a result of that. When conference rooms debate whether there is an economic slowdown, if they are B2C companies, they are speculating about the spending and saving / investment choices and compulsions of rich and poor individual people; and if they […]
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The Economic Times - 30 October 2006
The confusing part about the Indian market is that the issues affecting its health and wealth shift suddenly, and we are often caught unawares. From the beginning of liberalization, consumer demand has been the number 1 problem issue for us. Not enough of it, not for the price – product configurations that the rest of the world buys, truant monsoon dependant rural demand, flighty urban demand because new categories emerged faster than income growths and a premature hype about the middle class leading to exaggerated expectations and over creation of capacity. India Inc. went from era 1 of euphoria in the first half of the 90s with the unleashing of pent up demand to era 2 of despair in the mid to late 90s with demand growth way below expectations and new capacities built with high cost borrowings. Then came era 3 in the late 90s and early 2000s, with […]
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The Business World - May 2006
CONSUMER window data on markets is exceedingly useful, since it analyses markets as a collection of people who buy products, and not as a collection of products sold by a set of competitors. Unfortunately, such data is also difficult to come by. So, when such data comes along that is recent, nationally representative, low-priced and high-quality, my advice is to snap it up immediately! The Guide to Indian Markets 2006, by Hansa Research and Media Research Users Council is one such report, based on the Indian Readership Survey (IRS) of 2000 and 2005, an all-India study, with a large and rigorously designed and selected sample of about 1,65,000 households in urban India and about 75,000 in rural India. In each household, the housewife has been interviewed for details of household demographics, FMCG consumption, and ownership of durables, and a randomly selected adult, aged 12 years or above, interviewed for media habits. […]
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October 2005
The recently held CII Conference on Rural India was a wonderful stock taking on where Rural India stands as we speak. There was unanimity of opinion that it was far more advanced on most counts than is the general impression of it, in our minds. Even the development sector folk at the conference agreed that there was a new rural India that had a URAL – urbanized rural mind set (Dileep Ranjekar, Azim Premji Foundation) and was as avid consumer of microfinance for entrepreneurial ventures (Annie Dufflo, Micro Finance Institute). The NRS presentation made the point eloquently with data, that Rural India was not quite the dark continent, and had surprising amounts of consumption and media exposure. A few years ago, at a FICCI Conference, Ashok Das of HRG had made the case, using IRS data, that there was a ‘developed’ rural, not insubstantial in number, which had ‘close to […]
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