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Follow UsBANGALORE, INDIA: Shrinivas Chebbi, VP, India and SAARC, Schneider Electric lists outs his top fives for 2013.
1. Geographical shift: The emergence of new economies is an opportunity for our generation:
With Europe still under debt crisis and US economy looking at the uncertainty of the fiscal cliff, whole world is looking at the BRIC economies specially China and India, where despite multiple problems and slowing growth rate, the growth engines are moving along quite nicely.
Also, there are considerable opportunities beyond BRIC (e.g in Africa).
Also, we can't neglect the increasing Urbanization. As a Frost and Sullivan report notes there will be 25 Mega Cities in 2025 with over 8 Million Population and GDP of over $250 Billion.
The point to be noted here is that the major cities are sometime saturated in terms of traditional growth and businesses need to target the emerging cities that would turn out to be the next megacities. According to a McKinsey study, 25 cities in India are expected to become next megacities. Also, there would be 36 cities in the Global top 600 cities list by 2025.
2. Digitization: Everything is connected everywhere and at all times:
We are already witnessing the excitement on 'Big Data' everywhere which is nothing but the analytics to find useful information from the ever increasing data points available from customer databases to social media platforms and harnessing that information for the organization growth. Also, as Frost and Sullivan notes, LTE devices expected to consume anywhere from 1.5 to 3 times more data than 3G/3.5G devices of the same family. A majority of Smartphones will have the WiFi capability in coming years leading to even greater mobile data usage.
Similarly, consumers are demanding more and more remote control and capabilities to gather information and use it from the increasing digital asset footprints, be it a remote data centre or a factory abroad or just another warehouse in the other city.
India: A country going digital
80 million Internet users
10 million 3G connections within 6 months of launch, almost equal to the base of  wireline broadband connections
The second largest user base for Google+ and Orkut in the world
28 per cent of travel gets booked online; 117 million transactions on IRCTC alone
47 per cent of the classifieds business is online
7 per cent of bank users in India access their accounts online
25 per cent of IT returns were filed online in 2010-11
Close to 50 per cent of music revenues in India comes from mobile downloads
*Source: Avendus study
3. Everything as a Service: Exploring new business models and preparing new mindset for complete solutions:
Those days are gone when one can sell a product and then forget about it. Today, customers want a complete experience and therefore demand for good customer service is increasing where customers are willing to pay for the premium offerings.
On the supply side, businesses are realising that Service is a profitable opportunity instead of a cost drag as perceived before since the whole interaction cycle with customers has become longer. It is also an opportunity to lock the customers for longer time period and a scope to offer bundled products or service experience.
Increasing adoption of Cloud as well as pervasiveness of SaaS (Software as a Service), PaaS (Platform as a Service) and even IaaS (Infrastructure as a Service) justifies the focus on this trend. According to IDC, there will be over $25 billion in SaaS acquisitions over the next 20 months, up from $17 billion in the past 20 months.
This viewpoint of everything as a service increases the scope of Solutions offering and helps organizations like Schneider Electric which have multitudes of value propositions to address as one-stop-shop for all critical power and cooling related needs of the customers.
4. Sustainability: Energy as the key challenge for our planet:
One of the major challenge today's world is facing is the energy dilemma and there is no denying the fact that it is here to stay. Electricity demand is going to double by 2030 while overall global energy demand is going to double by 2050. On the other side, the need is to halve the Carbon emission by 2050 to avoid any dramatic climate change and its aftereffects.
So, some of the tangible effects that are going to hit us closer to home are rising energy cost, unreliable power supply and increasing conflicts for access and control of the limited resources.
Major focus areas:
Energy efficiency
Renewable energy
Electric Vehicles
SmartGrid and Smarter Cities
India's energy efficiency is the fifth lowest in the world, but there is room for substantial energy savings. The Industrial Sector consumes about half of the total commercial energy available in India, 70 per cent of which is in energy-intensive sectors - fertilizers, aluminium, textiles, cement, iron and steel, and paper -15-25 per cent of this is avoidable.
* Source: The Energy and Resources Institute, New Delhi
5. Comeback of Governments: Government spending is back, not only to save economies, but also from societal demand
The collapse of big financial institutions in western world has cast doubts on the sustainability of ever increasing capitalism and has brought back the focus on Government spending. Not only are Governments all over spending to save the economy from recession, society is asking for some sort of protection from them. The Indian Government is also focusing on industries like Infrastructure, Education and Financial inclusion.