The National Confectioners Association

The National Confectioners Association

Diverse is the one word that describes India best. With an area approximately one-third the size of the USA, it is home to over one billion people of considerable economic, ethnic, linguistic, cultural, and religious diversity.

After years of socialist-oriented economy and commercial relations oriented primarily to the Soviet block, in the mid-1980s India initiated economic reforms which started opening up its consumer markets to the western world. Overall, the country has managed to maintain economic growth even during the Asian crisis in 1998. Despite the reforms and economic growth, India continued to heavily restrict imports through the 1990s. However, in compliance with WTO commitments, in 2001 it removed all quantitative restrictions, which led to rapid increase of imports to the country. Nevertheless, the government continues to discourage imports through both tariff and non-tariff barriers.

place for foreign investment and several large multinational companies entered the market for confectionery products. This resulted in its steady growth and gradual transformation from a commodity market to a branded products market dominated by multinational companies.

Despite its vast population, India's confectionery market is still very small. It is valued at close to US $450 million, and is estimated to be 138,000 MT. Sugar confectionery (candies and toffees) has the largest share (50%), followed by chocolate, (16%), and bubble gum, (10%).

Over the 1998 - 2003 period, confectionery retail sales have grown more than 55% in value terms and 46% in volume terms, at an average annual rate of 9.5% and 8% respectively. There is a clear trend of faster sales growth in value terms, indicating that consumers are increasingly ready to pay a premium for higher value products. The chocolate segment is the fastest growing in value terms (9.8% average annual growth rate) closely followed by the gum segment (9.5%). In volume terms gums grow at the fastest rate (8.5%), followed by chocolate and sugar confectionery (7.8% each). At the same time, to put these figures in some perspective, while retail sales for 2003 in India are estimated to have been US$562 million (Rs. 26,220 million), US$26 billion worth of confectionery products were sold in the US. In volume terms these figures were 127,000 MT in India and 3.3 million MT in the US.