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An article in last Friday?s International Herald Tribune details the business strategy behind frenzied takeover bids for Indian mobile phone company Hutchinson-Essar by Vodafone, Reliance, Essar, and others.? Further into the article, writer Anand Giridharadas describes the BOP strategies of...
BOP Strategy in Action – Lessons from Hutchinson-EssarNews
Companies like General Motors, Unilever and Coca-Cola are pinning their future growth plans on Asia, where tens of millions of consumers are stepping over the threshold from poverty to the middle class. But to appeal to these low-income, highly price- conscious customers, many businesses are finding that they must learn to make money on drastically less expensive offerings. And as they reinvent themselves to suit the frugal shoppers of Asia, some wonder whether the strategies of Western corporat...
India’s vast market lures telecom giantsNews
STANDARD Chartered Bank has launched import and export financing for small and medium enterprises (SMEs). The product has an international trade account and the SME express trade product, Herman Kasekende, the SME Banking general manager, said last week. He explained that the product was designed to make international trade cheaper, faster and convenient. Sh1m will be required to open this type of account. Kasekende added that the operators of the international a...
Stanchart Bank Unveils New ProductNews
The future of the SME business is very promising and ICICI Bank is ideally positioned to exploit the opportunity, Vijay Chandok, Senior General Manager (Small Enterprises Group), ICICI Bank, said here today. Many SMEs are in the investment mode to create capacities, quality processes and upgradation and modernisation of their facilities, he said, adding this constituted a huge opportunity in the segment for the country’s second largest commercial bank. &...
ICICI Bank betting big on SME businessNews
Businesses are not philanthropies. So doing business at the so-called bottom of the pyramid (BOP) requires new strategies and tactics that are generally not familiar to traditional businessmen. There is a real market at the BOP, and that market could evolve more quickly with the help of the business community. But to capture the interest of multinational corporations, they must see clearly how they can profit from this opportunity. The first step is being convinced that th...
The “Next Big Thing” for Global BusinessBlog Post
There are skeptics in any field ? base of the pyramid business is no different. Over the years, however, the nature of BOP skepticism has changed. At first, many questioned whether low-income, emerging markets really mattered to businesses’ bottom lines and growth strategies. While...
Wal-Mart’s Base of the Pyramid PlayNews
Microfinance can provide tangible commercial opportunities for banks in the region notably if they partner with a microfinance institution, said Debbie Arnold, VP of Emerging Markets at Visa International, the world’s leading provider of electronic payments. Local commercial banks can benefit in various ways from commercial microfinance opportunities. They gain access to a new customer segment, can cross-sell non-competitive products and also benefit from new deposits and ne...
Visa encourages banks to partner with microfinance institutionsBlog Post
As a site dedicated for the past year and a half to the “next billion” and the business strategies that can empower them as micro-consumers and micro-producers, its good to see the Wall Street Journal using that headline in a mainstream business story about tech firms and their...
Welcome, WSJ – A Next Billion Retrospective
