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
印度孟買：步入中產的另一種表現形式，買了一輛全新的摩托車，1000美金就要分12個月付款，還占到了工資的十分之一，小編一開始寫就那么刻薄...
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
全球企業都盼望著印度像中國那樣快速發展，龐大的中產消費能力讓公司起飛，蘋果CEO庫克就非常看好印度發展，到底結果如何呢？
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.
每個企業都磨好刀準備宰印度這只肥羊了，亞馬遜，阿里巴巴，google，uber等都在印度落地，可惜最后發現，這些中產并沒有多少錢可以花
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
拿電商為例，印度電商增長緩慢，2017年增長25%已經是成績好看的一年了，不過是中國電商一周的增長而已！看上圖2016年幾乎沒漲，各個公司在印度賺的錢也不多，手機雖然很流行，但賣的都是一些基本款（就是便宜款），而不是世界各地流行的apple
總結：這篇文章音頻23分鐘，所以非常的長，對印度經濟和中產的分析特別詳細，接下來兩天也是繼續分析這篇文章
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Lexile?Measure: 1100L - 1200L
Mean Sentence Length: 17.27
Mean Log Word Frequency: 3.27
Word Count: 881
這篇文章的藍思值是在1100-1200L， 適合英語專業大二的水平學習，是經濟學人里普通難度
使用kindle斷斷續續地讀《經濟學人》三年，發現從一開始磕磕碰碰到現在比較順暢地讀完，進步很大，推薦購買！點擊這里可以去亞馬遜官網購買~
