Blume Ventures发布的印度市场报告将消费者分为三类：高收入的“印度1”（墨西哥），中等收入的“印度2”（印尼），以及低收入的“印度3”（撒哈拉以南非洲）。报告指出，印度有10亿人口几乎没有可支配收入，这给快速商业带来挑战。然而，报告也强调了印度制造业的潜力，认为加强制造业可以创造就业，提升消费能力。同时，中国快速商业平台对Zomato的研究，以及其供应链优势，也为印度市场提供了借鉴。

💰 印度消费市场被划分为三个层级，分别是“印度1：墨西哥”（高消费阶层）、“印度2：印度尼西亚”（有抱负的阶层）和“印度3：撒哈拉以南非洲”（无法货币化的用户和非用户），这反映了印度内部巨大的经济差异。

🏭 报告指出印度制造业的潜力尚未充分发挥，借鉴中国经验，加强制造业和工业园区建设，提升产品质量和供应能力，将有助于创造稳定的就业机会，从而提升“印度3”的消费能力，使其转变为“印度2”。

🚀 中国的快速商业平台对印度Zomato进行了深入研究，并且中国的领先平台都是供应链公司，这表明供应链管理在快速商业中的重要性，并为印度市场的发展提供了参考。

🤖 印度若想在AI领域有所突破，可能需要借鉴中国经验，即那些拥有大量计算资源，并有志于利用这些资源构建AI的极客，更有可能创造出类似ChatGPT的成果，而非仅仅依赖风险投资。

I just read, with great pleasure, the newly released Blume Ventures report on India. The report has been widely discussed amongst friends of Momentum Works, and probably generated some controversy.

Amongst many other interesting concepts, the report divides India’s consumers into three categories:

1. “India 1: Mexico” – “the Consuming Class” – 140m people with US$15k income per capita; 
2. “India 2: Indonesia” – “the Aspirant Class” – 300m people with US$3k income per capita; 
3. “India 3: Sub Saharan Africa ” – “Unometisable Users (& Non-Users)”- 1b people with ~$1k income per capita. 

Media reports typically focus on two areas of the report:

1. A billion people in India have no discretionary spending power (as above) 
2. Quick commerce will struggle to maintain current growth 

A few quick thoughts here: 

Back in 2016, I had a very interesting chat with a veteran VC investor (2 decades my senior) in Bangalore. He told me that to project the real TAM in India, the most important statistic to look into was the ‘employment growth’ in formal sectors. To see the gap between that and what many startups and VCs wanted to believe, divide that statistic by the number of young adults entering work age every year. Similar points were made in the Blume report;
The report also rightly points out that India’s manufacturing “punches well below its ideal weight”. Repeated discussions with ecommerce, logistics, quick commerce and consumer brand players in China all told the same thing: “manufacturing” and “industrial belts” enabled these sectors to boom in China. Supply of quality industrial and consumer goods would unleash the real potential of that in India – and create stable-paying jobs that turn “India 3” consumers into “India 2” consumers. This requires infrastructure development and consistent commitment from the government;
Mexico + Indonesia = a very large opportunity for consumer tech companies indeed. But it is not big enough to create a self-sustaining industrial-tech complex. I believe leading companies in India’s tech sector see this very clearly, and adapt their strategies for the specific market conditions;
We are all watching with delight the achievement of quick commerce in India – and the Blume report did a good job summarising the enabling factors. I was surprised, however, recently to discover that all leading quick commerce platforms in China have studied Zomato really hard. Also, leading quick commerce platforms in China are all supply chain companies – some food for thought here;
You can also read one of the first articles on TheLowDown, Momentum Works blog, called “Global internet giants – Only American, Chinese, and maybe Indian” for some of our earlier thoughts.
A few Indian friends recently asked me about DeepSeek and how India could build something similar. Here I would like to share a discussion I had a year ago with a good friend who is CTO of a leading AI company: “Someone in China will eventually build something as good as ChatGPT – but not the venture funded ones. I think it would more likely be one of those geeks doing either crypto mining or other business, who have amassed a lot of compute and who want to build AI using this compute.”

The post My thoughts on “1b Indian consumers have no spending power” first appeared on The Low Down - Momentum Works.