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I am of Indian origin and had the opportunity to travel to India three times in last 5 years. I have many relatives there so I keep in touch with the news from there.
To your points, India is well on the way to going from a quasi-capitalistic society to a full-fledged capatalistic society. Lot of the industries such as oil, electric, automotive have been deregulated or are on the way. This has given birth to genuine competitiveness, quality, product proliferation and shift towards a model that allows consumers plethora of choices when it comes to consumer goods.
Coming to the auto industry, lot of international manufacturers now have assembly and/or distribution facilities in India and several have teemed up with local manufacturers to provide local brands. GM's presence in India has been led my several Opel models which are sold successfully there. Mercedes, BMW, Skoda are also there. I would not be suprised that over a period of time Saab also begins to sell there. 10 years ago, maybe there were 4-5 models of cars available in India. Today, there are easily over 25 available. The cars there are more expensive even in absolute terms (dollar to dollar) for comparable models in the US (in term of class, the actual models are different), but the number of cars are steadily increasing.
It is a relatively untapped market when you consider the billion plus population and to your question about affordability, interest rates have fallen sufficiently to help the average consumer 'finance' houses, autos and other goods. Everybody in the middle class who before could not afford these goods, is starting to make these major purchases. Middle class spending is key in a capitalistic society and I see it happening in India. So basically the consumer class is being created and as an aside India's GDP is 7-8% annually which is pretty good. The last point is that salaries for qualified people have drastically gone up as well.
Now the flip side is that there are well over 600 million plus people in non-urban areas who are still very poor and don't have access to a lot of the products and amenities that we are talking about. So the road is long, but the trend seems to be there.
All in all I've seen tremendous amount of push towards capitalism in the last 5 years and see it continuing this way for a while.
Vivek
posted by 216.112.146...
, Thu, 6 Nov 2003 12:41:45, Thu, 6 Nov 2003 12:51:25, Wed, 5 Nov 2003 21:20:29, Thu, 6 Nov 2003 08:47:05
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