India story is unfolding!

Oil and petro-chemicals giant, Reliance Industries, are entering retail business in India. Bharti Airtel, India’s largest telecom firm that covers almost 23 percent market share, wants to enter retail business partnering with US based Wal-Mart. Wipro chairman, Azim Premji’ takes over south India based retail chain Subhiksha.

Retail business tycoon, Kishor Biyani, led Future Group launched their first retail store, Big Bazaar, in 2001 in Bangalore and in another 8 years they are operating more than 100 more stores across metro, tier-1 and tier-2 cities. Apart Future group also created other brands on the success of Big Bazaar like Pantaloons, Bijli Ghar, Food Bazaar, City Centrals exclusive brand showrooms, creating a 1000cr group with interests in manufacturing to retail value chain targeting every class of consumers in India, whose GDP growth has been increasing at a hefty pace of 8-9%.

One might wonder why all of a sudden there is so much interest of all the premier businessmen to enter the retail business?

See some of the numbers below:
910M - Total indian population in 2000
1.1B - Total Indian population (Times of India) in 2008
India's population is growing at a very rapid pace. Currently India in second most populated country with 1.1B numbers, just behind China's 1.25B, but India's population growth is uncontrollable, while china has controlled it to a great extent. As per estimates, India will be largest populated country by 2030 with 1.45B population.

10M - Indian know/speak English in 2000
100M - Indian know/speak English in 2007 -- as compared to 300M of USA and ~200M of European union - This number is growing very fast because India is producing 100K engineers every year from engineering colleges with engineering degree in English - This number gives good comfort factor to all the software and back-office firms that enough resources are available in India at one forth or one tenth cost that in US of A.
~10M - Indians are employed in Software or back-office industry. (per NASSCOM reports)

India has a demographic advantage of 100M English speaking population, vast population, comparatively cheap labor and favorable exchange rates for attracting good jobs in Back Office processing, Software Outsourcing, Research projects.

Since these sectors are providing good job opportunities, there are other sectors feeding up the demand for them. Due to getting good job and better salary standards, these persons employed in other sectors are also getting good opportunities around, with decent life, with better diet, more food options and better vehicle, better residence and year-end trip to Europe/Switzerland, cinema every alternate weekends. The decent lifestyle generated the demand in other sectors like Real-Estate, Restaurants, Hotels, Airline, Vacation Home and Trips, Theaters, Movies, Auto and many more creating better jobs for another almost 50M people in the country.

$1100 - Per-capita income in 2002
$2000 - Per-capita income in 2007
India's 1.1Billion population is generating very good demand for consumption story. If everyone spends 10% of one's income on staple foods, the whole numbers across the India's booming economy are really big. Due better opportunities arising in almost every sector, per-capita income is raising very fast, providing great opportunities in retail sector. Till 2004, India's retail was largely based on family owned small shops, mega-stores created have good opportunity to take up the opportunity and serve the biggest population.

India's retail story is unfolding, and providing enough growth for India story.