Transcript for India: Huge untapped market opportunity for MLVs

Good afternoon everybody. Thanks to the organizers for inviting me to speak

Very powerful presentations this morning

I think Connar covered a lot of things that I wanted to cover

Today I would like to cover some of the facts, interesting facts about India

In that way this presentation is a little historic

Mike, you can correct me, Is this the first presentation at LISA about India?

I have not heard it - I have always heard about China

So this is going to be interesting

Not heavy at all, it is going to be a light presentation

First I will get you through the agenda

First about the myths about India that I keep hearing and behind that are the facts

A little about the language diversity in India

How there are several similarities with Europe

In fact these similarities are the biggest differences when we compare with Europe

Some examples, some interesting opportunities and some interesting facts

And then you can pin me down with questions

First let me apologize because I may have some questions for you as well

First some myths

Most Indians knwo English very well... How Many?

How many do you think?

Percentage ... 95%

50%? 5%?

OK most of them are wrong

I'll come to the answers later

Most schools teach English in India or have instruction in English

Many people say that

Most Indian executives prefer communicating in English

It's ok to have the product literature and support in English

India just does fine with English why bother

Too many people in India are illiterate

so where is the market who is going to read all the stuff that we are going to produce

PC and broadband penetration is very low

Dont bother about the Indian market, nobody can read, nobody can access the internet

low bandwidth etcetera

India has too many dialects.. Are there 800 dialects in Hindi?

Maybe lets not worry about it anyway

So coming to the answers

10% is the maximum English speaking population that you have got

out of 1.2 billion people

So are here to worry about, just this 10% or the other 90%

I am here to talk about the 90%

If you want to talk about the 10% we can do that outside

English speaking population is just 10% and out of this

only 0.2M people, not an exact figure, about, use English as their first language

And if you roughly split this 10%

70% would know at least one Indian language

and English would be the second language

and for the rest English would actually be the third language

So what it shows you is

that given a choice today

An Indian would be very comfortable reading, writing or talking

at least talking in an Indian language

And English would come after that

The number of schools in English medium is just about 20%

and that is today

not previously so you can make out the difference

It might increase tomorrow by a certain extent

But again the English medium is something only at the primary level right now

Literacy rates we talked about -- poor literacy rates

At a very very conservative average that I have got

I have only taken a population that is relevant for us

right now, is an age group of 15-24 years

and that is about 300 million people

and they are literate

and we talked about a lot of dialects

we talked about a lot of languages

The top 8 languages in India - the regional languages

covers about 75% of the Indian population

Does anybody have an idea of how many official Indian languages there are?

Well officially there are actually two Indian languages

two languages, English and Hindi

But the other languages we call Scheduled Languages

Which is another 20

So you have got 22 scheduled languages

Out of that 8 languages would cover 75% of the Indian population

Again taking 1.2 million people as the base, which is the 2nd largest population the world after China

It is the 4th largest economy by the way of purchasing power

And that's about $4 Trillion

32% of the people are below the age of 14

So you know where your workforce is going to come from - this is something that you don't find in China

This 32% of the workforce is going to learn English or is going to learn 3 different languages

We don't know - it is on us how we want to take this forward

And let me tell you another thing

14-35 years is another 30% of the people

so 60% of the population of India is below the age of 35

Teledensity is 41%

Largely due to mobile phones - any guesses on what the split is between landlines and mobiles?

Any guesses ....

About 16 to 18% is landlines

And the same 16-18% who own the landlines also own mobile phones

and many people have probably two mobile phones

Guess what is the amount of money you spend talking long distance within India?

50 - if you talk 50 minutes in India - How much does it cost?

$1 long distance with in India is $1

If you fly from the northern part of India to the southern part of India it takes you 3½ hours

That is as good as my flying from Delhi to Thailand

It is that large - it would be more that 3,800 Km

so that is long distance within the country

So you just spent $1 talking for 50 continuous minutes

min you the billing is per second not per minute

So that is about mobile phone users, and mobile phone users rose every month by 2.5 million

That is the population of Canada every month

So India has 800 dialects - 15 major languages

So this is how it is distributed in our population

So Hindi is the largest language which roughly covers about 40% of the population

Followed by major languages like Bengali - we call it Bangla

Telugu, Marathi, Tamil, Urdu, Gujerati and the others follow

I tried to plot this - it was a very difficult task

so I plotted the top few languages for Europe and the top few languages of India

But what I found was that when I just crossed a few bars on this list

In the first 3 bars that I plotted - the population of India was already crossing the European population

The European population is about 700M roughly

and about 10-12 languages are most popular

The top 3 Indian languages account for about that many

Even at conservative literacy levels the market size would be bigger in India

And some examples of companies that recognized this, they made it work, and they are very prosperous today

Nokia - they just came a few years back. They localized in 13 Indic languages

Indic would involve some other languages around India like Sinhalese or Pashto

They localized in 13 Indic languages

Guess what the market share for Nokia phones is today?

It's about 72%

For an Indian market where you are selling so many mobile phones where 40% is the teledensity

For selling in India, before they used to import the mobile phones from China

Now they have a dedicated manufacturing facility down south in India

manufacturing something like 300 million mobile phones a year or something like that

And that is only for the Indian market,still they are not exporting from there

So Nokia saw this opportunity to localize all their interfaces

I think their interfaces are localized into just 6 or 7 Indian languages

But the user guide is localized in 13 Indic languages

So when you buy a mobile phone, you gotta to use it and

there are many features in the phone that yo have to read in the manual to use it

Other manufacturers did not recognize that

and all the advertising and the marketing materials, everything went in regional languages

So immediately people made a connect and started naturally buying mobile phones

So when you go to India don't be surprised when everybody turns up with a Nokia mobile phone

You don't need to take your chargers there, just forget them at home

Star network is a very popular entertainment network

from Rupert Murdoch - when they came they used to run all the US based soap operas

For the first 3 - 3½ years, they were almost going to close down

They found hardly anybody to watch them

Because nobody would understand what they are trying to say

and there was no connect - and then they slowly started localizing their programs

The first thing that they did was have Hindi news

and immediately within a 1 year period after that they started having Hindi movies, and Hindi based soap operas, the mix started changing

and today I think they are the third spot, 2nd or 3rd spot in terms of share

Suzuki runs the largest automobile company in India

It is know as Maruti-Suzuki there

It also exports from there

All their user manuals, all their sales based training programs

are at least localized into the Hindi language

Thats because when the sales person in the showroom sells to people they have to

talk to people in regional langauges

Somebody said today that if you talk to the person in a regional language it goes to the heart

so sales have to be done like that

it is not all with the brain - there is an emotional attachment in sales also

so thats how things succeeded for Suzuki motors

The same also goes for Hiro-Honda motors

They are also the largest selling motor bike company in India.

Again the same strategy, sell in the regional languages.

All the manuals, all the training sessions that they conducted

for the people are in the local languages

The other manufacturers did not follow this and they are way behind

Hiro-Honda has a market share of 65% in the Indian market.

Maruti-Sazuki has nearly 62% market share in the Indian market.

Coca Cola did the same, they have their training programs in four regional languages.

I have some data that I want to show you at the end because we may be running out of time.

Local newspapers - which will also give you an idea of what the spread is like,

for reading different language papers. And you will see what the English papers sell and what the local papers sell.

Microsoft as you know localizes into 7 Indian languages, so

so now it sells a lot of licenses to the Govt of India

Earlier it wouldn't do that, Openoffice was localized in different Indian languages l

and it was being used in Govt departments but that is no longer true.

Google of course is another company that has localized into several Indian languages.

Yahoo has done it's daily news in seven Indian languages

So where are the opportunities?

We have 9 Indian companies in the Fortune 500 list

And guess what, most of them are not IT or software companies.

So it is a very popular belief that India is into BPO or into software services but these may not be the largest companies in the world.

So there is IOC which is the Indian Oil Corp., there is the Tata group which many people would have heard of because,

they acquired some large motor companies in the UK

You probably have heard of Reliance Industries because they are a very large conglomerate into oils, natural gas, telephone

internet and god knows everything

State Bank of India is partly a government enterprise

but it's a bank. And there are

several other companies. There are only two companies which are software companies in the Fortune 500.

These companies are making a lot of acquisitions abroad

They are moving out of India, setting up offices. They are making

products and services available to people outside of India now.

Gone are the times when Indian companies are seeking business from US or European companies only.

It's going the other way now.

Indian companies are now becoming customers to large companies outside the US.

So the quicker everybody realizes that India has a lot of business to be given out the better.

The people who realize that will make the most out of it.

So the 32% of the upcoming population that I was talking about

plus the 30% in the other age group I was talking about,

is the employable population that India is going to have in the next 10-15 years.

So the purchasing power that you got today will increase by so many more times in the next 10-15 years.

When the purchasing power increases, you know what is going to happen.

The formula is very simple.

The government and education spend about 2% of the GDP.

I talked about the GDP of $4 trillion.

Its going to spend about 2% this year in education

And education means: India has a three language formula

I'll take a minute to explain that

For all the regional places that are there in India

the medium of instruction in school is the regional language.

So if I am in Kerala, my first language of instruction in school will be Malayalam.

The second would probably be either English or Hindi.

So the government is going to spend a lot of money in educating people in all these states.

And you need CONTENT in the local format, to be available

to make this successful, so

There are some companies that have already grabbed some opportunities

There is a leading company from Ireland that is into elearning and training that has already grabbed some opportunities.

They have connected with Indian publishers and made a dedicated center there

they have started localizing the programs in Hind (they are intelligent) they have started localizing the programs in Indian English

Why Indian English?

Something new, you know US English. So the next time you see in Word a dropdown in Indian English

that may not be surprising

Indian English is different. There are many new words like "prepone"

which India invented. Do you know what prepone means?

It is there in the Oxford dictionary today.

It is the opposite of postpone.

When you bring a date forward it is called prepone. Simple.

There are companies that have already grabbed this opportunity.

And they are selling well.

And the same applies to corporate training, customized training for industrial manuals

In most of the regional places where there are large manufacturing centers

e.g. Nokia has setup a facility in Chennai

all their manufacturing manuals, their safety manuals, their guides, their ISO manuals, everything

has been localized for the state which is Tamil Nadu, which is the Tamil language.

A huge amount of data was localized Some MLV lost that opportunity.

But I know who got the business.

So, machine translation is something that we have been discussing over and over again.

I sincerely hope that it works.

And it works for Indian languages, because this is something we really need in India.

A huge amount of data remains un-localized.

On the internet or in physical form. If it does happen, this is going to be revolutionary for India.

And as I mentioned earlier, Indian companies are going out, making acquisitions and Indian English - these are all opportunities lined up.

It's not working

So localization business has started to generate from a lot other industries now.

Hotels, in India are starting to localize

their websites in different languages, because they are seeing visitors coming from different countries.

So we have all kinds of European languages, Chinese

Japanese, Korean being localized for hotel websites.

Tata Group is one of the companies that owns the largest chain of hotels in India

also localizing their websites now.

Travel, hospitality, education, tourism, radio, film TV these are the leading industries in localization.

If you go to India you will see that most of the films that run here in English

would be dubbed and subtitled, in most of the Indian languages.

And guess what? The localization is done by an international movie company

who has setup a shop in India.

Again somebody lost some business there.

The mobile space is extremely promising as I said and,

as I said earlier, PC penetration is not great. It is only 10-11% of the Indian population.

But who cares. Mobile phones are going to be there and already 40% mobile penetration has happened.

And yesterday Dirk and I were discussing how mobile phone technology has gotten to the most rural parts of India,

in terms of accessing the Internet.

Very small USB discs being used to access the Internet in the most rural parts

You don't even need a power cable to be using that.

Backlog in government documents. The government has it's own department for translating documents.

But this year they have started to give out documents for translation to companies outside.

Why? Because they realize something.

They have 5 years of pending data that they have not translated.

5 years ! So Its coming this year.

And why do we say that you need to localize your products and sell within India for the Indian market?

There area huge amount of Indian people outside of India who will also buy these products.

I know several of my friends in the US who would want to educate their children in Hindi or English

and they are looking out for CDs and stories, all in localized languages.

They simply don't get it, they get it all in English.

So just for the US, there are 3 million Indian people in the US alone.

And then there's the UK and several other countries.

You have Tamil as the 4th official language for Singapore and Malaysia.

If you go to Singapore, in the metro, you will see that Tamil is the 4th language mentioned all over the place.

Because of the huge amount of population who immigrated from Tamil Nadu in India.

And there is a large chunk of Malayalam speakers in the Middle East.

This is a popular site in India and the point I wanted to make here was

you may not be able to see. This is the Economic Times which is written in English, and

the same thing is written in Hindi and Gujerati below here.

Economic Times is the main business newspaper.

It is the most widely read business newspaper in India.

And if that is available in Gujerati and Hindi for business news, not for

general news, you can understand that the business language is not just English.

Here are some interesting facts.

Sanskrit is considered to be the mother of all higher languages in India.

Many people probably know that.

Punjabi is written in two scripts: Gurumukhi (L2R) and Sharmukhi (R2L)

And the strange thing is that one is written from left to right and the other is written right to left,

in the exact same diction.

There is no difference in pronunciation whatsoever.

And the strange part, Gurumukhi is used in India and Sharmukhi is used

in Pakistan. So where do you find more speakers of Punjabi?

Take a guess?

Yes but there is a Punjab in India and in Pakistan.

No no no come on!

Bangla we know is an Indian language but it is also the national language for another country.

Bangladesh, and therefore Bangladesh actually has more people who speak Bangla.

So you may not be talking just about an Indian language, but here is a whole country that we sometimes ignore.

Which of Urdu or Punjabi is more spoken in Pakistan?

Any idea? You are right, Punjabi is more spoken, but it

is a popular belief that Urdu is the most spoken language in Pakistan. It is not.

Punjabi is and that is the answer. There are more speakers of Punjabi in Pakistan than in India.

Again we have another country involved here, not just an Indian language.

Do you think you need a charger to charge your mobile phone?

If you go to the rural parts of India, you don't even need power to access the internet or charge your mobile phone.

Launched about 2 months back in India.

It runs on solar power and charges on solar power.

How about carbon footprint? Thank you.

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