Strategic tools for the practising manager

KIT

The hardware market in India is estimated to be Rs 7,400 crore.

hardware primarily includes paint, sanitary ware, flooring and other products such as door knobs, storage tanks, pipes and so on.

This is a category with a high penetration of brands. Brands have a 70 per cent share of the paints category; 50 per cent in sanitary ware; and 60 per cent in flooring.

The category is growing at an yearly rate of 8-10 per cent, primarily led by the growth of the housing sector due to easy availability of loans.

Although initially trade-oriented, the hardware market is slowly orienting itself towards the final consumer.

There is an absence of organised retailing in the hardware segment. Most of the hardware in India is sold through neighbourhood markets in India.

Some of the manufacturing brands, particularly in paints and flooring such as Kajaria, ICI and Asian Paints, are planning to enter into paints retailing. Parryware has opened its experience centres in metros to display its product range.

Selections from management journals
NUGGETS

In a bid to reduce customer churn, many banks and subscription-based companies have created specialised call centres known as save desks. McKinsey's research suggests that few of these specialised call centres live up to their potential.

Companies operating the best and worst save desks hire, train and manage agents differently. The best also make better use of customer data. Emulating the practices of top-performing save desks should help companies to lower churn rates, improve profitability, and even develop new products.

A call centre's last line of defence
The McKinsey Quarterly,
Marketing Strategy

Macroeconomic, social and business trends shape the global landscape. Anticipating their impact can help companies succeed by riding the current rather than swimming against it. Executives must understand the full range of subtrends behind each trend and how they interact to affect many industries "" and not just the obvious ones.

According to new research, companies that shift their portfolios to align them with favourable trends are much more likely to achieve strong growth and profits. Large companies must innovate to take advantage of global trends without jeopardising the core business. They can succeed by combining their scale assets to create and amplify the value of their innovations.

Going from global trends to corporate strategy
The McKinsey Quarterly,
2006, Number 3

Subscribe to both articles at http://www.mckinseyquarterly.com/

Rajesh Jain has a lot in common with Marc Andreeson, co-founder of Netscape. Just as the Netscape IPO in 1995 is widely believed to have sparked the Internet boom in the US, Jain ignited a dot-com storm in India when his portal "" IndiaWorld "" was sold in November 1999 for $115 million to Sify, an Internet service provider.

That deal signalled to millions in that country that the web was not just a passing techie fad and that entrepreneurs could make serious money from it.

In recent years, Jain, 39, makes his views on technology issues widely known through his blog, emergic.org. He met with Knowledge@Wharton in his offices in Mumbai to discuss how mobile phones could hold the key to the Internet's evolution in India and other emerging economies.

Netcore CEO Rajesh Jain: 'In India, the future of the Internet will be built around the mobile phone'
Knowledge@Wharton,
October18, 2006

Read the complete article at http://knowledge.wharton