Multinational businesses relying on Indian consumers face disappointment

Jan 11th 2018 | MUMBAI

THE arrival of T.N. Srinath into the middle class will take place in style, atop a new Honda Activa 4G scooter. Fed up with Mumbai’s crowded commuter trains, the 28-year-old insurance clerk will become the first person in his family to own a motor vehicle. Easy credit means the 64,000 rupees ($1,000) he is paying a dealership in central Mumbai will be spread over two years. But the cost will still gobble up over a tenth of his salary. It will be much dearer than a train pass, he says, with pride.

Choosing to afford such incremental comforts is the purview of the world’s middle class, from Mumbai to Minneapolis and Mexico City to Moscow. Rising incomes and the desire for status have, in recent decades, seen such choices become far more widespread in a host of emerging markets—most obviously and most spectacularly in China. The shopping list of the newly better off includes designer clothes, electronic devices, cars, foreign holidays and other attainable luxuries.

gobble：to swallow or eat something quickly

incremental: a usually small amount or degree by which something is made larger or greater

印度孟买：步入中产的另一种表现形式，买了一辆全新的摩托车，1000美金就要分12个月付款，还占到了工资的十分之一，小编一开始写就那么刻薄...

Many companies around the world are looking to India for a repeat performance of China’s middle-class expansion.India is, after all, another country with 1.3bn people, a fast-growing economy and favourable demography. And China’s growth is flagging, at least by the standards of the past two decades. Companies which made a packet there, both incomers such as Apple and locals like Alibaba, are seeking pastures new. Firms that missed the boat on China or, like Amazon and Facebook, were simply not allowed in, want to be sure that they do not miss out this time.

Enthusiasm about India is boundless. “I see a lot of similarities to where China was several years ago. And so I’m very, very bullish and very, very optimistic about India,” Tim Cook, Apple’s boss, recently told investors. A walk around the Ambience Mall in Delhi shows he is not the only multinational boss with big ambitions in the country. Indian brands like Fabindia, a purveyor of fancy clothes and crafts, are outnumbered by Western ones such as Levi’s, Starbucks, Zara and BMW. The slums that host a quarter of all India’s city dwellers feel a long way off.

pasture: a large area of land where animals feed on the grass

greener pastures or pastures new: a new and better place or situation

bullish: hopeful or confident that something or someone will be successful: optimistic about the future of something or someone

purveyor: a person or business that sells or provides something

全球企业都盼望着印度像中国那样快速发展，庞大的中产消费能力让公司起飞，苹果CEO库克就非常看好印度发展，到底结果如何呢？

Beyond the mall, Amazon has committed $5bn to establish a presence in the world’s biggest democracy. Alibaba has backed Paytm, a local e-commerce venture, to the tune of $500m. SoftBank, a Japanese investor, has funded a slew of start-ups premised on the potential buying power of India’s middle class. Uber, the world’s biggest ride-hailing firm, has hit the streets. Google, Facebook and Netflix are vying for online eyeballs. IKEA is putting the finishing touches to the first of 25 shops it plans to open over the next seven years. Paul Polman, boss of Unilever, has described India as potentially the consumer giant’s biggest market. Reports put out by management consultants routinely point to 300m-400m Indians in the ranks of the global middle class. HSBC, a bank, recently described nearly 300m Indians as “middle class”, a figure it thinks will rise to 550m by 2025.

But for some of the firms trying to tap this “bird of gold” opportunity, as McKinsey once called it, an awkward truth is making itself felt: a lot of this middle class has little money to spend.There are many rich people in India—but they number in the mere millions. There are a great many more who have risen above the poverty line—but not so far above it that they spend much on anything other than feeding their families.And there is less in between the two than meets the eye.

每个企业都磨好刀准备宰印度这只肥羊了，亚马逊，阿里巴巴，google，uber等都在印度落地，可惜最后发现，这些中产并没有多少钱可以花

Missing the mark

Companies that have tried to tap the Indian opportunity have found that returns fell short of the hype. Take e-commerce.The expectation that several hundred million Indians would shop online was what convinced Amazon and local rivals to invest heavily. Industry revenue-growth rates of well over 100% in 2014 and 2015 prompted analysts to forecast $100bnin sales by 2020, around five times today’s total.

That now looks implausible. In 2016, e-commerce sales hardly grew at all. At least 2017 looks a little better, with growth of 25-30%, according to analysts (see chart 1). But that barely exceeds the 20% the industry averages globally. Even after years of enticing customers with heavily discounted wares, perhaps 50m online shoppers are active in India—roughly, the richest 5-10% of the population, says Arya Sen of Jefferies, an investment bank. In dollar terms, growth in Indian e-commerce in 2017 was comparable to a week or so of today’s growth in China. Tellingly, few websites venture beyond English, a language in which perhaps only one in ten are conversant and which is preferred by the economic elite.

India has yet to move the needle for the world’s big tech groups. Apple made 0.7% of its global revenues there in the year to March 2017. Facebook, though it has 241m users in India, probably the most in the world in one country, registered revenues of just $51m in the same period. Google is growing more slowly in India than in the rest of the world.Mobile phones have become popular as their price has tumbled—but most handsets sold are basic devices rather than the smartphones that are ubiquitous elsewhere in the world.

implausible: not believable or realistic: not plausible

拿电商为例，印度电商增长缓慢，2017年增长25%已经是成绩好看的一年了，不过是中国电商一周的增长而已！看上图2016年几乎没涨，各个公司在印度赚的钱也不多，手机虽然很流行，但卖的都是一些基本款（就是便宜款），而不是世界各地流行的apple

总结：这篇文章音频23分钟，所以非常的长，对印度经济和中产的分析特别详细，接下来两天也是继续分析这篇文章

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Results

Lexile®Measure: 1100L - 1200L

Mean Sentence Length: 17.27

Mean Log Word Frequency: 3.27

Word Count: 881

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