Industry News

How to Localize for the Indian Market

India, for some time now the focal point of the global trend toward strategic offshoring, has simultaneously become appealing as a market in its own right. With GDP growth more than double that of the United States and the United Kingdom during the past decade, and with forecast continued real annual growth of almost 7 percent,1 India is one of the world's most promising and fastest-growing economies, and multinational companies are eagerly investing there.

Yet the performance of the multinationals that have tried to exploit this opportunity has been decidedly mixed. Many of those notable for their strong performance elsewhere have yet to achieve significant market positions (or even average industry profitability) in India, despite a significant investment of time and capital in its industries.2 Why? Perhaps because the market entry strategies that have worked so well for these companies elsewhere—bringing in tried and tested products and business models from other countries, leveraging capabilities and skills from core markets, and forming joint ventures to tap into local expertise and share start-up costs—are less successful in India. Our research3 suggests that the most successful multinationals in India have been those that did not merely tailor their existing strategy to an intriguing local market but instead cut a strategy from whole cloth. In short, they have resisted the instinct to transplant to India the best of what they do elsewhere, even going so far as to treat the country as a bottom-up development opportunity.

With less of a focus on the initial entry and with a longer-term view of what a thriving Indian business would look like, the more successful companies have invested time and resources to understand local consumers and business conditions: tailoring product offers to the entire market, from the high-end to the middle and lower-end segments; reengineering supply chains; and even skipping the joint-venture route. The reward for this effort? Of the 50-plus multinational companies with a significant presence in India, the 9 market leaders, including British American Tobacco (BAT), Hyundai Motor, Suzuki Motor, and Unilever, have an average return on capital employed of around 48 percent. Even the next 26 have an average ROCE of 36 percent (exhibit).