With 100 million hearing impaired Indians, the growth prospects for GN ReSound India are significant. Until January 1 GN ReSound was somewhat restricted in pursuing an aggressive growth strategy for this immense emerging market, as GN ReSound India Private Ltd. was owned 51% by the two Indians who founded the company 15 years ago. Following GN ReSound’s takeover of the entire company a new strategy has been developed. While the new General Manager, Andreas Geisinger, may be new to the job, he does in fact have five years’ prior experience with GN ReSound India.
Together with GN ReSound’s executive management, Andreas Geisinger has laid out a new and aggressive growth strategy: “Traditionally, India’s hearing instrument industry has been reluctant to go digital. This is in contrast to developments in the consumer electronics industry, where you can buy any cutting edge technology the world offers. We intend to change this so that Indians can get the same high quality and well-adapted hearing instruments as Europeans and Americans can, and to demonstrate that GN ReSound is a technology leader,” says Andreas Geisinger.
The means will be a concerted effort to better educate young audiologists and raise awareness of hearing quality. Already this spring, GN ReSound paved the way with the Indian launch of some of the company’s newest products – “dot by ReSound”, ReSound Ziga and Resound Essence. “dot by ReSound” and ReSound Ziga were only launched on the world market earlier this year, but are already available from Mumbai to Calcutta – in a marketplace, where competitors are still promoting products that are five or six years old.
“Over the coming 18 months we expect to create 100 new accounts – audiologist that we will train through our new GN ReSound Academy. We expect to continue the high growth – over the past couple of years, we have had growth rates in the 15-20% range,” says Andreas Geisinger.
Last year, an estimated 200,000 imported hearing instruments were sold in India, while another 200,000 sold were cheap, locally-produced products. GN ReSound is a comfortable number two in the marketplace.
The price span on hearing instruments in India is remarkable: from the cheapest government-licensed products at 650 Rupees (DKK 75) to the imported products at some 140,000 Rupees (DKK 16.500). An estimated 70% of all hearing instruments in India are priced at less than DKK 500 to the end-user. So the price alone means that India will continue to be a large market for analog instruments, and in spite of GN ReSound’s efforts to digitize India’s hearing instruments market, the company will continue to leverage its broad portfolio of analogue instruments, thus covering the entire market.
Today, GN ReSound India has approximately 400 dispensers and 60 employees. The company is headquartered in Mumbai and covers all of India through 8 branch offices, of which 4 are equipped with hearing laboratories.
