The Economic Times - 18 March 2002
Dominique Turcq, a McKinsey consultant, described India and China as “Asia’s Non Identical Twins” – many similarities, and yet starkly different too. This phrase leapt to my mind on a recent visit to China. While today, the economic differences between India and China are very stark (all we need to do is drive through Shanghai or look at the economic indices), the similarity in the structure and culture of these markets is very real too. This makes for a genuine opportunity (not one that is defined by hype and hope) for Indian companies to leverage their business experience and skills to create businesses in China which can be at least as large as what they have in India. Like India, China is a complex multi tiered market in various simultaneous stages of evolution – the bullock cart to car continuum, and the Government to MNC continuum co-existing, be it healthcare […]
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The Economic Times - January 2002
It is corporate results time again, and stock market analysts are busy analysing the state of the markets – the markets that they spend their time worrying about and the markets that I spend my time worrying about. I used to wonder if there really was a connect between the two, a thought that was wonderfully captured in an Economic Times headline of a few years ago: “The Sensex is driven by neither sense nor sex”! However this is a new age, and I can’t but help notice how much more involved and aware stock market analysts and fund managers are about what is happening in consumer markets. They know their retail audit data very well and have more up to date analyses of segment and category wise aggregate demand than I do; they track market shares with the same tenacity as brand managers, and they ask a gamut of […]
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The Economic Times - November 2001
A business leader with a wry sense of humour recently observed that since the main reason being given by almost all businesses for slow consumer sales was the delay in the festival season and the fewer auspicious dates for marriages, the Hindu calendar should figure as a key variable for annual sales forecasting. I guess a corollary to that is that one of the key routes to stimulating market growth would be to lobby with the Hindu high priests and persuade them to be a wee bit more market friendly in their interpretation of the stars! Having determined that astrology and sentimentality (of the consumer confidence kind) can’t be cured in the short term at least, corporate speak is now about surviving and emerging stronger from this continuing slowdown, through “better customer understanding” and “innovation”. I would have felt a lot better if the connection between the two were made […]
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The Economic Times - June 2001
The last time I wrote in this column about the telecom business, a senior person from within the business called saying he wanted to salute my courage – the ‘fools rush in where telecom experts fear to tread’ sort of courage. I probably have a death wish, so here I am again, venturing an opinion on the ‘hot topic’ of Reliance Infocom’s proposition to consumers, and what works and does not work with Indian consumers. In my line of work, there is a lot of agonizing about whether enough alternate ways of playing in any market have been explored. Yet there is a significant gap that exists between the aspiration of ‘changing the rules of the game’ and the actual development of a revolutionary business strategy to achieve it. The same old way of looking at consumers – same old segmenting variables, same old pricing paradigms, same old obsession with […]
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The Economic Times - April 2001
It is the winter of our discontent again, as the pendulum of consumer demand journeys from the ‘there’s lots more where this came from’ end to the ‘Wonder where it disappeared’ end. For many of the A league companies, even the game of maintaining bottom line growth, despite flagging top line growth, has been played out. There is a limit to which the costs or operational efficiencies can be extracted from a given business system. For many less agile companies, the red ink is happening, as the overall growth of their market slows down, and their more aggressive competitors gobble up market share. There is bad news affecting all our four consumption sectors. Negligible agricultural growth affecting rural consumption, stock market crash and slow industrial growth affecting urban consumption, the US slowdown affecting the infotech dependent consumption sector, the belt tightening that the Government is doing affecting government job dependent […]
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