2007 Base of the Pyramid e-Journal Competition

The Base of the Pyramid (BoP) Learning Lab of the Center for Sustainable Global Enterprise at the Johnson School of Management, Cornell University is accepting submissions for its 2007 BoP e-Journal Competition. The competition seeks to highlight the challenges of doing business in underserved markets and identify innovative business experiments or solutions to those challenges.

BOP Market Size: $1.3 Trillion (WRI)

In International Dollar, the number, actually is $5 Trillion, which breaks down as follows. The BOP market in Asia (including the Middle East) is by far the largest: 2.86 billion people in 19 countries, with an aggregate income of $3.47 trillion. The BOP market in these countries represents 83% of the region’s population and 42%

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BOP Shared Mobile Access (WRI)

Another innovative business model—shared access, in which an entrepreneur with a phone provides pay-per-use access to a community—has extended the social and economic impact of mobile phones beyond the subscriber base. In South Africa more than half the traffic on Vodacom’s mobile network in 2004 came not from its 8 million subscribers but from 4,400

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BOP Markets: Mobile Telephony (Excerpt from the WRI Report)

Perhaps the strongest and most dramatic BOP success story is mobile telephony. Between 2000 and 2005 the number of mobile subscribers in developing countries grew more than fivefold—to nearly 1.4 billion. Growth was rapid in all regions, but fastest in sub-Saharan Africa—Nigeria’s subscriber base grew from 370,000 to 16.8 million in just four years (World

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BOP Markets (Excerpt from the WRI Report)

The 4 billion people at the base of the economic pyramid (BOP)—all those with incomes below $3,000 in local purchasing power—live in relative poverty. Their incomes in current U.S. dollars are less than $3.35 a day in Brazil, $2.11 in China, $1.89 in Ghana, and $1.56 in India. Yet together they have substantial purchasing power:

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P-A-L-M to the boonies?

Wall Street Journal reports that the two Palms are showing signs of wanting to getting back together. “PalmOne Inc. said it is acquiring full rights to the “Palm” brand name and will change its name to Palm Inc. later this year. Milpitas, Calif.-based PalmOne also said Tuesday that it has renewed its license of the

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Low-cost PCs

EE Times reports on the low-cost PC market in India: “Aiming at India residents with no PC experience, Novatium is developing the Nova NetPC, a thin client expected to cost just $100. The PC is now in beta-stage development and will reportedly be maintenance-free and appliance-like. Novatium’ three founders include Analog Devices’ chairman Ray Stata,

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Coke, Pepsi & the Indian Heartland

December 2004. We were traveling in India. As we waited for our train at a small railway station in Bolpur, a small town near Calcutta, we watched a boy of 10 or 12 arrange his merchandise in preparation for boarding the train to Calcutta. He stacked up hundreds of packets of chips, cookies, and snacks

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