New Delhi, Dec. 23 -- The consumption headroom in India is vast, while penetration is low. Tap into this gap and growth will follow. That's the parting thesis of Vineet Agrawal, who is retiring as CEO of Wipro Consumer Care & Lighting after four decades with the company. Its contention will sound familiar in the boardrooms of many Indian FMCG companies.
While Agrawal is broadly right, headroom by itself has never been a strategy. The harder question, for Wipro as well as for India's FMCG sector in general, is who converts that promise into durable scale without losing focus.
Wipro Consumer today sits in an awkward middle ground. It is too large to be called niche, yet too small to enjoy the structural advantages of India's FMCG behemoths....