| News and Insights
Arun Bhardwaj, vice president - emerging business, Starbucks Coffee Company, said in an interview that the company was committed to India and has been engaged in dialogue for some time with potential India partners
The study points out that the majority of Indian consumers have shown better skills in managing their household financial budget and are confident of facing any financial impediments in future, compared with citizens of nine other countries.
Banking on 'Indo-vation' from India, L'Oreal is targeting to capture a billion new consumers in emerging markets.
2011 seems to be poised for a tablet war. With India being an attractive market for these gadgets, here are some exciting technologies and products to watch out for
Public inflation expectations remained relatively stable, with a slight upward bias emerging.
Spending in stores, restaurants, gas stations, and online averaged $55 per day in the week ending Jan. 9 , a decline from the $68 average for the same week in 2010
Consumer confidence in Shanghai’s economy declined to a year’s low in the fourth quarter of 2010 on rising inflationary pressure, possible yuan appreciation and stubbornly high housing prices
People often assume retail sales and consumer confidence would rise and fall in tandem. But separate reports released Friday show a strong 2010 retail sales trend followed by declining consumer confidence in January.
CES was once again dominated by Google’s Android OS. The best devices at the show all ran on the Android platform. The biggest draw, the Motorola Xoom tablet, also showed off the upcoming Android 3.0 “Honeycomb” interface, made specifically for tablets.
The committee, constituted under the Ministry of Consumer Affairs and Public Distribution, has prepared a draft report by taking the concerns and viewpoints of all stakeholders concerned.
"If your prices of food are going up it probably makes less sense to have import barriers or quotas or other things," Zoellick said in an interview in the bank's New Delhi office
There are about 4 million households (21 million people) in urban India that can be classified as luxury consumers.
There is no clear definition of either luxury products or luxury consumers. In fact, the various expressions used when describing the luxury market only add to the confusion. Broadly, in the Western world, luxury consumers are defined as the top 2-5% of earners or the 10% of income.
The Bureau of Labor Statistics (BLS) classifies the 111 million households of the United States into equal-sized quintiles based upon household income. The lower cut-off for households in the upper quintile, about $75,000, provides a reliable definition of the luxury market—households with income within the upper quintile of the BLS's model. The average income for those households in the upper quintile is $1,21,367.
In the Indian context, there are three defining levels of incomes at which consumption of luxury products and services take place. At Indicus, we define these levels as
* Luxury consumers – HHld income > Rs 1 million pa
* High end luxury consumers – HHld income > Rs 2 million pa
* Super luxury consumers – HHld income > Rs 5 million pa
Notice that although in exchange rate terms, Rs 1 million is only $25,000, in terms of value of goods and services it can buy, it is closer to $80,000-90,000. Thus when a household crosses the threshold of Rs 1 million, it is in consumption terms already equivalent to the upper quintile of the US households.
Our research indicates that there are about 4 million households (21 million people) in urban India that can be classified as luxury consumers. Of these, 1.4 million households (7.3 million people) are high-end luxury product/services consumers And, 1,65,000 households (9,17,000 people) are super luxury product/services consumers. The numbers of rural luxury product consumers are estimated to be less than 10% of the urban numbers.
While India is still emerging in terms of number of luxury consumers, there are no more than a handful of countries on the planet that have more luxury consumers. In five years, India will scale past many of the G8 nations. It is the fastest growing market in terms of number of consumers, and by 2020, only China, the US and Japan will have more consumers in the high-end luxury and super-luxury categories than India.
Insights from Indicus
In this segment, households with senior citizens are very few and would be joint families
Despite government intervention, the maternal mortality ratio is alarmingly high in some states
Though all inflation indices show falling rates, as we, at Indicus, have been saying for the past two years, inflation is not on its way out
The benefits of subsidised LPG fail to trickle down to low-income households in India
The Telangana dispute is different from the reorganisations that took place in 2000
The young households in the urban SEC B segment form a small segment of a little less than 10 lakh households
There are more than two million SEC B urban households across India with a population close to 10 million.
The number of children per woman has been declining but the poorer skew the record
The organized sector in India has created 7,39,064 jobs between January-September 2010
The country's urban development evades the issue of a burgeoning slum population
SEC B households are the second most affluent households in urban India, comprising 1.4% of urban households.
BUT INFLATION, ALTHOUGH UNDER CONTROL, CAN GET OUT OF HAND | 
Products