Adidas launches $1 trainers in India

The sports shoe firm, Adidas, is to sell its trainers for less than a pound a pair throughout rural India to capitalise on the country’s soaring population. The German sports giant believes the rise of India’s 1.1 billion population, which is expected to surpass China as the world’s largest in the next decade, is an opportunity to persuade Indian villagers to trade their plastic chappals or flip-flops for one of the world’s most iconic brands. The idea was inspired by Mohammad Yunus, the Nobel Prize-winning founder of the Grameen microfinance bank in Bangladesh, but the company now believes his plan to sell the world’s cheapest trainers has more chance of success in India. The $1 trainers will be the latest in a growing trend which increasingly sees the world’s poor as a potentially lucrative market rather than a begging bowl for aid. In the past few years mobile phone companies like Vodafone and India’s Reliance have had great success selling cheap mobile phones to rickshaw-pullers and roadside hawkers throughout India, while Tata, which owns Jaguar Land Rover, launched the world’s cheapest car. The Tata Nano was launched as the world’s cheapest car for ‘One Lakh’ rupees or around £1200, and aimed to persuade families travelling five to a motorbike to trade up. The company followed the model with India’s cheapest water purifier and the country’s lowest cost apartments. Adidas had originally planned to launch its venture in Bangladesh but switched to India after a pilot project lost money.