Why Companies Should Stick Out Indian Markets: Ravi Venkatesan
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Asked late last year about the market for Apple Inc. products in India, Chief Executive Officer Tim Cook more or less wrote off the huge country.
He blamed a “multilayer distribution structure” for making it too hard to reach consumers beyond elites in cities such as Mumbai and Bangalore. Apple would look elsewhere for growth: “In the intermediate term there will be larger opportunities outside there,” Cook said. Today, India -- with a middle class the size of the U.S. population -- accounts for less than 1 percent of Apple’s global sales.