Mature Market
Once ignored, a
range of products and services are looking to tap into the senior citizen
market
When her husband retired from his job as general
manager at BPCL, Regie Thomas followed suit by taking voluntary retirement from
hers, as a trainer at a travel company. The reason? So that she, too, could
devote time to the pleasurable pursuit of travelling. “It wouldn’t have been
fair to my students otherwise,” says Thomas, now 59. So far, the Kochi-based
couple have travelled to most parts of India, including driving all the way to
Gujarat over a month, and holidayed abroad, too. Just this year, they spent a
seven-week holiday in the US, travelling from the West Coast to the East. Far
from being bored, retirement for the couple has come to mean more time to
pursue their shared passion of globetrotting.
The Thomases might prefer to do their travel
independently but the category of senior citizen holidays is one that companies
are enthusiastic about. According to a 2013 report by market research firm
Frost & Sullivan, the number of senior citizen travellers is expected to
grow seven-fold to 7.3 million by 2030. Travel company Thomas Cook considers
this one of the fastestgrowing segments in the market, accounting for 35% of
its overall leisure business. “The combination of early retirement, high
disposable income (often topped up by their children) and a healthy lifestyle
have given room for more leisure time, creating demand for travel and our
internal data indicates an approximate 18-20% year-onyear growth,” says Rajeev
Kale, president and country head, holidays, at Thomas Cook.
Travel is not the only category seeing growth among
the 60+ age group in India. Rahul Gupta launched his startup, Senior World,
with the intention of catering to an age group that he felt was being left out.
The push came from senior citizens in his own family, including his parents,
who are in their 80s. “These elders could be highly educated but still be
scared of using technology,” says Gupta.
With that in mind, the startup has launched a variety
of mobile phones (while some of them double as a quasi hearing aid, others are
hearing-aid compatible), group travel packages and motion sensor lights, among
others. Though he declined to reveal profits and margins, Gupta says the
bootstrapped startup has been seeing 100% growth in revenue, year-on-year.
Apart from Gupta’s startup, there is Senior Shelf, which offers products and
services for the elderly, serial entrepreneur Meena Ganesh’s Portea, which
offers elder care among its portfolio of services, and Nightingales Home
Services, also in the home healthcare business. The ₹350 crore adult diaper market,
too, is forecast to “grow significantly due to increasing healthcare standards
in the country”, according to consultancy Bonafide Research in its report
“India Diapers Market 2021”. In real estate, consultancy JLL estimates in a
report that the demand for formal senior living facilities would be 312,000
units.
With those aged 60 and above, numbering 104 million
in the 2011 Census, estimated to make up 20% of the country’s population by
2050, it is no wonder that the market is sitting up to take notice of a
hitherto ignored segment. But as Senior World’s Gupta says, creating awareness
remains a challenge. “There are unique needs that are not being looked at. But
one needs to be patient.”
indulekha.aravind@timesgroup.com
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