I wanted to get a better sense of the fast growing Chinese and Indian economies both qualitatively and quantitatively. So, looked for books that covered both micro and macro economic perspectives and bought this one titled "The $10 Trillion Prize: Captivating the Newly Affluent in China and India" from Amazon. Five individuals are listed as authors. The first four are partners in a firm called Boston Consulting Group that is a marketing consultant company working with Western companies that are trying to break into these two markets. Looks like the last one, Simon Targett, is the actual writer, who also seems to have joined this BCG now as Editor in Chief from his previous post as Financial Times editor.
The title designed to grab attention refers to the size of the combined consumer market in China and India by the year 2020. China's market is estimated to be ~$6.2 trillion and India's ~$3.6 trillion. First part of the book talks about the on-going and forth coming raise of the new middle class in that continent that will fuel the consumer demand in addition to the new super-rich billionaires as well as the "left behind" one billion poor people who still need products and services, though priced at the lower end of the spectrum. Second part analyzes individual product segments such as food & drink, real estate/house, luxury goods, digital products and education. Authors do a decent job of addressing each area providing exactly 50/50 coverage to Chinese & Indian markets. Their analysis is generally correct. For example, they classify Indian rich consumers into three categories. First are the ones that inherited a lot of money and so were always rich. They like flaunting their wealth with expensive cars, clothes, hiring an army of servants, and so forth. Second is the highly educated professionals that came from lower middle class families but worked their butts off to reach their current level. They don't like to flaunt their wealth but will spend a lot on their kids' education or buying a nice home to house their family. Third kind are the ones who are not necessarily highly educated but started a business at the right time and became rich raising with the tide. For them having an expensive car or other such luxury items is a statement saying they have arrived and should be taken seriously. Good categorization indeed. But not sure if such an understanding is new/unusual that the authors have developed.
Third part of the book is titled Lessons for Business Leaders and talks about consumer mentality (they seek value for money in cheap as well as expensive goods/services), how West induced changes in China/India affects the West back both positively and negatively and how hungry, ambitious and driven entrepreneurs in those two countries are.
On the whole book sounds too pedantic, repeatedly emphasizing that the authors are the experts in the field and will tell you what to do to succeed in this market. Despite that tone, I didn't find any new meta-level ideas. Most of the book reads like newspaper reporting that spits out stats, tables and charts linking them via disconnected sentences describing those numbers. Several chapters have action items for business leaders entering this market to take up. But the AIs are vague and simple, such as understand your consumer's needs, put your best people on the job, work patiently for years, etc. There are a lot of personal anecdotes interspersed that shows how hard people in those two countries work and how ambitious they are. Since these consultants are bullish on that region, they are waxing eloquently about people burning themselves up to grow their personal wealth & business. But I am not sure that is the best way forward for the entire world. This book might be a useful to handout to their potential customers who have no clue about India/China and seek out BCG as consultants. It will probably help establish them as domain experts to tease out new business. But perhaps simply by being a sentinel being, I am aware of what is going on in that part of the world. So, personally I felt the kind of unusual new insights I look for in books is totally missing in this one.
I think you can skip the book and look at this PDF to get all the contents in few mins:http://documents.bcg.com/BCG_10_Trillion_Dollar_Prize_Executive_Summary_Booklet_2012.pdf
One amusing thing to note is the Amazon customer reviews (about 20) posted for this book, which seems to be mostly self/friends/family generated. :-)
-sundar.
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