The Goods and Services Tax (GST) can be a big game-changer if it happens this year, according to D Shivakumar, Chairman & CEO, PepsiCo India. Businesses need not have depots all over as the GST will unify the country as one common market.

“Depending on how long your product can travel, you can start defining your warehouses, and you are not bound by the confines of a State. Consumer products, for instance, can travel 300 to 400 km,” he explains.

GST will help the scaling up of the system, from sourcing to manufacturing and distribution as companies can build large warehouses. Delivering the valedictory address at the Madras Management Association’s (MMA) annual convention around the theme ‘India 2015: The year of resurgence’, he said, “This will change our scale thinking; the new industries like telecom, new airlines have thought scale, but old industries have thought small. This will change,” he explains.

Talking about other significant shifts in the year ahead, he said that young people in rural India don’t want to work in farms but aspire to work in the service sector in urban areas. “It’s extremely important to create a million jobs every month for the next 10 years or there will be social strife,” he points out.

“Tech and the new-age SME will help create the jobs. They need less capital and more intellect. However, the skill base is still in analogue mode, but future jobs will be in the digital world. We have to rapidly change the syllabus; it should be make in India for a digital world,” he says.

Outlining the other big shifts which will happen this year and which will have an impact on India as well, Shivakumar said, “The price of oil is trending below $50. Also, eight of the top 10 commodities are likely to be at the lowest prices this year with inflation being at an all-time low level which is good news for all of us”. Shivakumar also suggested that India can emerge as the app super power of the world. SIM card and smart phone sales are soaring in India. “We will see a huge digital industry pop up in India thanks to this,” he says.

He points out that in 2015 the number of SIMs will be higher than the world’s population: 7.5 billion in sales versus a world population of 7.3 billion.

“Never has any product category’s sales overtaken the world’s population, not cars or watches. This is a very significant digital event.” In India, 900 million SIMs and 700 million phones are in use; this year alone, there will be 150 million phones sold, of which 100 million will be smart phones. This will spur the digital apps industry.

This year, the sales of tablets will outstrip sales of PCs. “PCs is a 45-year-old industry, whereas tablets is a seven-year-old industry. There’s a lesson here: if you don’t innovate, the category will die. PCs remained as a black box and nothing was done to it,” explains Shivakumar. “A digital eco system will disrupt every industry. Any industry which has been untouched with tech is going to be touched by mobile phones and the internet,” he adds.

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