How the diverse cultural heritage of the region impacts businesses.

One of the defining characteristics of Asian countries is the staggering amount of diversity, particularly in the case of India. Among the countries in South and Southeast Asia, almost all major religions of the world are practiced at a large scale with communities belonging to each religion being concentrated in different countries and in different regions within these countries. This differentiates Asia from Europe and North America, as the religious and ethnic buildup of the countries is far more heterogeneous than Europe. But the distribution of religious and ethnic communities is not evenly distributed like in the USA. This can be described by the following statistics: Indonesia has a Muslim population of almost 90%, while China is 51 predominantly Buddhist as 95% of the citizens practice the religion and The Philippines has an 85% Roman Catholic population (Sunil Dutta et al, 2014).

India’s religious heterogeneity is higher than even other Asian countries. Although Hinduism is the predominant religion with 80% of all Indians practicing it, other religions have a large footprint as well with 13% of the Indian population being Muslim, 2.3% being Christian and 1.9% being Sikh. (India, Office of the Registrar General & Census Commissioner, 2001) The diversity extends beyond religious beliefs, as cultural differences across various regions in India can be stark. One factor contributing to this diversity is language. Hindi, the most commonly spoken language is used by 43% of the population but there are 21 other languages which have at least a million speakers each within India. (India, Office of the Registrar General & Census Commissioner, p 15, 2011). While this has more notable and direct impact on product design and marketing, the Supply Chains of companies can also be impacted both directly and indirectly.

Thus, businesses need to account for the linguistic, cultural and religious factors in the region as a whole and at the specific location they are planning to begin their international foray.

Shivam Vashisht