india ... 30 new sub distributors

Fellow (happy) PLT'ers,

Amongst the many facets of today's announcement, one of the items that really caught my eye was the following:

>>>
Progress following end of half year
...
a) Truscreen
...
. . China
...
. . South Korea
...
. . India
. - Deliveries of consoles have commenced.
. - 30 additional sub-distributors have been appointed, trained and become operational.
<<<<

Wooaaaahhhhh!

30 (additional!) sub-distributors, all trained up and ready to go! This gives you an indication of just how huge the place is, and what a big task it is to cover it. We all focus on China, because (amongst other reasons) it is obviously bigger and has a greater population, but India looks ready to really kick-in soon.

30 seemed like a lot, although I did wonder if it had something to do with states, sub-divisions / regions etc., so I did a little research via WikiPedia (as you do). It didn't take long to find out where the 30 came from. Here's a summary:
- there are 28 states and 7 Territories
. (so 28 sub-distributors for states + 2 to cover the territories?)
- each state or territory is divided into basic units of government and administration called districts ... there are nearly 600 of them (is this the equivalent of a council?)
- the population as at 2007 is estimated to be 1.12 billion

The link is: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/India#Subdivisions

When they say 30 additional sub-distributors, we don't really know how many it is additional to ... it might just be in addition to the main distributor, unless anybody can provide information otherwise.

Let's say 30.
- if you divide 1.12 billion by 30 you get 37 million people per sub-distributor (on average; each almost twice Australia's population!)
- let's say each sub-distributor manages to only sell one TruScreen console per month, which would be a poor effort given 37 million people
... 1 * 12 * 30 = 360 consoles per year
- if they sold 3 units per month, we get over 1,000 consoles per year
etc.

Today's announcement (and the previous one) mentioned 200 confirmed orders from China; obviously this will increase over time, but it gives you an idea of the magnitude.

Obviously the SUS sales to support those consoles generate the income thereafter, and India is going to be huge.

A simplistic stab at it possibly, and I have no real idea about the country, market environment etc. etc., but just from a numbers perspective it does seem a bit mind boggling.

Anyhow, enough rambling, I just came across the numbers and thought I'd have some fun with it, and point to a different part of today's announcement from what has been discussed to date. If anybody has anything more solid or other comments, please feel free to discuss as always.

Cheers.