KIT: Packaged food and staples

Strategic tools for the practising manager

The current market for packaged food is $2.6 billion (Rs 13,090 crore).

Eighty per cent of the packaged food industry is organised.

India produces over 200 million tonnes of grain and is self-sufficient.

The sugar industry is currently at $3.4 billion (Rs 17,117 crore) with more than 450 production units in the country.

The edible oil market is growing at a CAGR of 7 per cent.

NUGGETS
Selections from management journals

It’s relatively rare for transformation programmes to succeed; many surveys put the success rate at less than 40 per cent. McKinsey’s recent research, however, underscores the fact that certain tactics promote successful outcomes. The most important tactics are setting clear and high aspirations and targets, exercising strong leadership from the top, creating an unambiguous structure for the transformation, and maintaining energy and involvement throughout the organisation.

Companies that used all of these tactics succeeded more than 80 per cent of the time. The same research also shows that defensive transformations (those undertaken to stem trouble) have lower success rates than progressive ones (launched, for instance, to boost growth or to move from good to great performance). This finding seems to contradict the common wisdom that it is hardest to transform a company when it lacks an acute and apparent need for change.

Corporate transformation under pressure
Josep Isern, Mary C Meaney and Sarah Wilson
The McKinsey Quarterly April 2009
Subscribe to this article at www.mckinseyquarterly.com

One of the most informed assessments of a particular company’s strategy and business prospects is the analyst’s report. Reading a report will tell managers a lot more about a company than whether to buy or sell. Business leaders using the recession as an opportunity to re-examine business practices would do well to leverage the management insights of professional investors. However unlikely this might seem, there is a very compelling reason why the habits and observations of professional, institutional investors can help business leaders revive and even save their companies: Equity analysts and portfolio managers at mutual funds, hedge funds and other investment companies are among the most assiduous, well-resourced students of business practices around.

Beyond buy or sell: What a business leader really can learn from an analyst’s report
By Anne-Marie Fink
Ivey Business Journal, March/April 2009
Read this article at www.iveybusinessjournal.com

Soya processing and leasing companies caught the Indian stock markets’ imagination in the early 1990s. Then came the Y2K rush and the dotcom boom in the late 1990s, followed by yet another binge on IT software stocks. According to Raamdeo Agrawal, co-founder of Motilal Oswal Securities, the stock markets "always come up with a story every four or five years." Agrawal and other investment experts discussed India’s capital markets during the recent Wharton India Economic Forum in Philadelphia. While declining foreign investments may temporarily threaten economic growth, many of the speakers said they remained bullish on India, especially for the long term.

India’s new stock market story and its ‘next trillion dollar opportunity’
India Knowledge@Wharton
April 9
Read this article at http://knowledge.wharton.upenn.edu/india/