Posts from — January 2010

The results of a survey published by consultancy firm Nielsen indicates that Indians are most optimistic about job prospects and personal finances compared to the rest of the world. The Nielsen Global Consumer Confidence report that 92% of Indians were optimistic about their job prospects over the next year.
In addition, the survey Nielsen published revealed Indians as the most optimistic about the state of their personal finances with 14% of Indians saying it is an ‘excellent’ time to make purchases and 71% answering it is a ‘good’ time.
In conducting the online survey, Nielsen asked about the confidence, major concerns and spending intentions of 27,000 users in 48 countries. India ranked the highest in all categories.
The booming confidence of the country can certainly be attributed to the recent economic growth India has enjoyed.
Obviously, this is an encouraging sign for both Indian and international businesses alike. It is important for consumers to be confident in their purchases and spending, and for workers to have a positive attitude about their employment and career development. Now the country must turn back to its infrastructural issues, as well as handling the increasing food prices, which a large portion of those surveyed complained about.

When I teach my seminars on “Business with India” I am often asked how women should prepare for a work trip to India and how they should behave.  Conflicting advice from well meaning Indian Americans  makes matters worse for many first time travelers.  I addressed this subject in my book “Doing Business in 21st Century India” which was published by Hachette.

It was particularly heartening to see that a fellow author has included my book at the top of her Amazon Listmania list “India for the American Business Woman” see http://tinyurl.com/India-US-Women.

In 2009 “India maintained robust growth  (6.7%) without Beijing’s hefty stimulus of $585 billion in part because it is less exposed to the international economy. China’s exports represented 35% of GDP compared with only 24% for India in 2008. Thus India was afforded more protection from the worst effects of the financial crisis in the West, while China’s government needed to be much more active to replace lost exports to the U.S. More significantly, though, India’s domestic economy provides greater cushion from external shocks than China’s.”

Private domestic consumption accounts for 57% of GDP in India compared with only 35% in China. India’s confident consumer didn’t let the economy down. Passenger car sales in India in December jumped 40% from a year earlier.

Read the full story here

Before he got a mobile phone seven years ago, Vijay Navle, a small Mumbai fish trader, spent much of his time and scant income travelling on buses and trains, according to the Financial Times.

Every day, he would make the five-hour round trip to visit fishermen living on the Arabian Sea on the north of the city to see if they had caught any of the prawns and large fish that he sells to exporters at south Mumbai’s Sassoon Dock.

Today, like a growing number of Indians, rich and poor, Mr Navle and the fishermen have mobile phones. Fishermen call him when they catch something and he arranges the pick-up and delivery to customers by phone. “I can immediately inform my customers that there’s a big catch coming in fresh and we get a better price for it,” says Mr Navle.

…

While mobiles can change lives for the better, advances in technology can also be a double-edged sword, as fish trader Mr Navle is discovering.

The mobile initially gave him an edge. But recently, his income has declined as customers have begun calling around to get a better price. “Earlier, they would deal only with me. I would have dedicated customers. Now they are calling other traders as well,” he says.

For hundreds of millions of people across India such as Mr Navle, the rise of mobile telephony has led to changes in their lives as profound as the advent of the fixed-line home telephone was for rich consumers in the west.

Top executives of companies are generally a sanguine bunch. But the economic crisis of 2008 shook their confident about future prospects and the recovery in confidence has not been uniform. According the 2010 Price Waterhouse Survey of 1,198 CEOs, 81 per cent of CEOs worldwide are confident of their prospects (compared to 61 pecent a year ago).

Indian execs as supremely confident at 97 per cent, whereas 91 per cent in China feel confident about their prospects; Only 80 percent of CEOs in the United States share their Asian brethren’s attitude.