Targeting India for your business in the long run? Here’s how your customers in India are aging.
Being the second most populated country in the world, India presents itself as a huge market for businesses across the world. However, the way the Indian population is expected to age over the years could be equally important for such businesses.
India is expected to overtake China to become the world’s most populous country in the next 3 to 5 years. In this blog, we’ll take a closer look at the aging patterns of the growing population in India, based on data published by the United Nations Department of Economic and Social Affairs- Population Division. Importantly, instead of simply looking at next 3 or 5 years, we look at the changes that are expected to happen over the next 80 years.
Population Pyramid- also called the “age-sex pyramid”, is defined by wiki as ‘a graphical illustration that shows the distribution of various age groups in a population’. The pictures below illustrate how the population pyramid is going to look like in the years 2017, 2050 and 2100, for India. The vertical axis represents the age, while the horizontal axis represents the population in millions. Thus, as per this data, there will be almost 50 million girls in the age-range 5–10 years, in the year 2050. The number of girls in the age-range 0–5 will be slightly less than the number of girls in the age-range 5–10, in 2050.
Over the next 80 years, the shape of the pyramid is expected to undergo significant changes. It is clear that the average age is going to increase over the years. Here are some other key observations and their potential implications for the businesses that aim to target the customers in India.
a) The age-wise distribution is expected to flatten over the next few decades. Notice how the bars corresponding to the higher ages grow longer, eventually outsizing the younger cohorts? Thus, the businesses focusing solely on the people in their 20s stand at a risk of overlooking customer segments that are older yet equally large or even greater in number.
b) The bars consistently get longer for people in their 70s, and beyond. This is also the age when people need assistance in some form. With the culture of nuclear families on the rise, this required support may not come from within the families. Consequently, enterprises focused on providing care to the customers in this segment, in some form of assisted living, could be in for huge market size in the future.
c) The bars for the ages 30–60 gradually exceed those corresponding to 0-30 years in size. Interestingly, this is the age when most of the people are at the peak of their careers, and consequently, can be expected to have more money to spend and invest. However, the way this cohort handles money is different from the way people handle their money in their teens or 20s. Businesses must keep these factors in mind before framing their value propositions.
d) The bars get relatively shorter for the 0–20-year-olds over the period of time. This implies that this customer segment should not be mistaken to be ‘ever-increasing’. In fact, this cohort is expected to shrink by roughly 50% in the years to come.
At a broader level, even the population of India must not be mistaken to be ever-increasing. Curious to learn why? Here’s a brilliant demonstration by Hans Rosling, noted statistician and co-author of the book Factfulness explaining why the population is not an eternally upward trending curve. Bill Gates says Factfulness is one of the best books that he has ever read.
You can learn more about the Indian population pyramid using this link.
