Though most marketers have a way of focusing on the headline numbers, as the recent reports of Indicus Analytics' The Market Skyline of India 2006 show, this can be quite misleading. The Mumbai Suburban district, for instance, is the country's biggest market at Rs 39,484 crore this year but, for someone like Mukesh Ambani, who aims to become India's Sam Walton, surely what is more relevant is the size of the catchment area around a store that he sets up, the sales per square kilometre. Measure it this way, and it is the traditionally disregarded East Delhi district that comes out tops with sales of Rs 149 crore per square kilometre this year. This is ironic since East Delhi hardly has any shopping malls. The other irony, in the same context, is that neighbouring Gurgaon is seen as one of the more happening markets, given the sprouting of shopping malls there, but Gurgaon offers a market density of only Rs 1.8 crore per square kilometre, compared to Rs 5 crore for Ghaziabad (neighbouring East Delhi), which is not seen to be in the same class. For a purveyor of slightly more upmarket goods, on the other hand, what's important is that a third of Bangalore families earn more than Rs 3 lakh a year, compared to only 20 per cent for Mumbai Suburban. | |
| The other important lesson that needs to be noted is the limited size of the markets in cities. The top 10 cities obviously have a much higher share of the market than their population share but, at the end of the day, they account for just 11 per cent of the country's total market, the top 30 account for just 20 per cent, and the top 100 for just a fourth. Clearly, there is no option but to move down to the smaller towns and rural areas, and that means finding new delivery modules to service those markets""since a PVR cannot sell tickets for Rs 150 in a small town, it needs to find a model that allows it to sell them at Rs 30. |
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| Another issue that comes out clearly from the reports is that rich does not necessarily mean unequal. Areas such as East Delhi are clearly among the richest in the country (it has the highest shopping density and 42 per cent of its households earn more than Rs 3 lakh a year), but they are also among the most equal. The per capita income of East Delhi's rich households, or those that earn over Rs 3 lakh annually, is Rs 160,000 right now, a figure that is a little less than double the average for the district as a whole. For the Kishanganj district in Bihar, identified as one which has the highest number of poor households (defined as those earning less than Rs 75,000 a year) for each rich household, this difference in per capita incomes is nearly 16 times. Indeed, for most of the richer districts, the difference in per capita incomes is around 2-3 times while for the poorer districts the difference is at least 7-8 times. Equally interestingly, the data show that when there is a higher proportion of affluent households located in rural areas, inequality tends to be greater"" presumably, urban wealth generates more high-value employment and therefore leads to lower inequalities. |
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