In an earlier note I argued that one of the biggest risks in India today is underestimating how much the market has changed. The follow-up question came back quickly: what should a European company do differently if it wants to enter India well?
I was discussing exactly this recently with a European company supplying weighing equipment and warehouse technology. They had worked through an Indian distributor for years. The market had never really taken off. At first it looked like a distributor performance issue.
Looking closer, something more fundamental emerged. The company itself had barely been in India for years. The distributor was covering for the absence — and that absence was the perception gap I wrote about earlier, made operational.
Build local presence
My first piece of advice was straightforward. The era in which India can simply be “covered” through an agent is largely behind us. Agents may still have a role, but most carry several principals at once and naturally prioritise the products and suppliers that invest most actively in the relationship.
That is reality. You may still work through distributors or agents for execution, but promotion, market development and customer relationships increasingly need your own people in the market. That is the signal of commitment Indian customers and partners are reading. And it is the difference between an Indian business that runs and one that stays stuck.
Treat supply chain as part of market entry, not after it
The second question I push much harder than most decks do is supply chain design. Too often it is treated as an operational question to solve once market entry is decided. In reality it is part of the market entry strategy itself.
Do you keep importing from Europe? Do you hold local stock to improve responsiveness? Could local assembly make sense, especially in the context of the EU-India FTA’s tariff phase-in? These choices shape competitiveness directly.
Speed matters here in a way many European executives still underestimate. India is, in many sectors, a flash economy. Consumer platforms like Zepto and Blinkit have rewired expectations. Customers in some categories now think in minutes, not days. B2B decision-making is of course different, but the expectation around responsiveness has bled into business buying behaviour. That makes local stockholding and supply chain design more strategic than European companies typically assume.
Step back and rethink the business model
The third recommendation sounds simple, but I have seen it produce surprising clarity.
Years ago, in DSM’s innovation team, I often ran business model workshops using the Business Model Canvas. The framework is standard now — taught in every marketing class. I am still struck by how many companies entering India have not really worked through those choices systematically. Who should the channel partners be? Which parts of the value chain do you control yourself? What activities sit in India and which do not? How does the proposition need to adapt to Indian market realities?
A structured one or two-day workshop on those questions can produce more clarity than months of fragmented discussion. Not because the answers are inside the framework. Because the framework forces the team to make choices instead of leaving them implicit.
So what
Entering India successfully is rarely a single decision. It is a set of interconnected choices around presence, supply chain and business model. The earlier those are thought through together, the stronger the route in tends to be.
If your India entry has been “in progress” for two years through a distributor and the numbers refuse to move, the right next step is rarely to replace the distributor. It is to step back and ask whether the underlying choices about presence, supply chain and business model were ever made deliberately in the first place.
If this resonates, let’s talk.
