Every Single Minute

The big idea India's distribution system was built for an unusually difficult environment: 1.4+ billion consumers • thousands of towns • fragmented retail • multiple languages • weak infrastructure in many markets • enormous price sensitivity. Yet Indian companies built distribution networks capable of putting products into millions of outlets. The lesson for Africa is not to copy India's system wholesale. It is to understand the principles that made distribution work in a fragmented emerging market . 1. Why distribution became India's competitive weapon For decades, an Indian company could have a good product and still fail because it could not get the product: from factory → distributor → wholesaler → retailer → consumer. Large Western-style organised retail was limited. The winning companies therefore developed extraordinary capabilities in: distributor management wholesaler relationships retailer coverage route-to-market design credit management sales-force productivity...