Our Visit To Toy Biz India Trade Show - July 2024

We just returned to the office after a visit to the Toy Biz Toy trade show in Delhi, organised by the Toy Association of India.

The following Blog article is a review of the show, based on the script for the podcast episode our CEO Steve Reece recorded running through our experience at the Toy Biz India show this time round. if you prefer to listen to the episode instead, you can click here: https://playingatbusiness.libsyn.com/ep-108-toy-biz-india-trade-show-review

One of the reasons why I spend a lot of time in and on India, is because in my role as Consultant I am seeking ways and means to help Toy companies. It’s therefore my job to explore up and coming geographies and trends, because most of you already know lots about established Toy markets like the USA or the UK. I do plenty of work in established markets, but I also see it as my remit to be out there exploring to find opportunities for clients in the Toy & Game business.

So please understand, just because I am looking at these new geographies does not mean I am saying you should spend all your business time & efforts in a developing market like India – clearly the current opportunities are greater in bigger more stablished markets – focus on North America & Europe first, but if you are an established company, it is getting harder to grow in the major western markets, and so I believe we should also invest time, energy & resources in future growth opportunities, and with a growing population of 1.4 billion people and with an economy growing at something like 7%, I see real growth ahead.- Now I have been travelling to India for over a decade now for business.

Originally I visited to check out Indian manufacturing and tour customers around factories.- But in the last 5 years or so I have also seen the growth of product origination coming out of India. And it was with this in mind that I went off to Delhi.- Like many of you listening to this I have visited a lot of Toy trade shows over the years. I've been to the vast sprawling halls of Spielwarenmesse in Nuremberg, and to many smaller shows.- And I was genuinely surprised and impressed by The Toy Biz show I just attended in Delhi. It was bigger than I expected with more than 400 exhibitors.

I would say the size and scale of the show is on a par with the UK show in London, albeit the London show has bigger more corporate exhibition booths, and is a bigger Toy market in $ terms currently. The other striking factor here was that the exhibitors were overwhelmingly Indian Toy companies. This shows the growth in India's domestic Toy market.

One massive cultural difference you have to quickly get used to at an Indian trade show is the way of arranging meetings. For the major shows in Nuremberg, or New York, you really need to pre-book as many meetings as possible in advance. In fact it's not uncommon to have all meeting slots fully booked before the show, and if you just run up with no appointments you often find nobody has time to talk to you!

Things aren't done in such a structured way in India. I had a couple of dozen  vague arrangements to meet people at some point in the show, or maybe on one particular day.

Each day at the show is then a series of fairly random meetings, which end with you finding a stream of whats app messages and missed calls from someone wanting to be your next meeting! Nevertheless, I managed to be fully occupied throughout 3 full days at the show, and I felt like I truly met the great and the good of the Indian Toy industry! Another remarkable fact about this show, is that it's organised entirely by a committee of Toy company owners coming together under the banner of the Toy Association of India.

So my congratulations and thanks go to the organisers of the show. I mentioned earlier about India's product origination. But I don't want to give the wrong impression here. I am not saying that all of the 400+ exhibitors have world leading innovation. I am also not saying everything was export ready, because a lot of the products and companies want to export, but are not yet ready to have success with Exports.

Like most local / National Toy shows the vast majority of products I saw were fairly average 'me too' type products. Still good products mind you, just not earth shattering.- And of course there are some products which would not make sense to export. Iterations of Indian gods in Toy form would only have niche opportunity within diaspora Indian communities of course. But, there are also some absolute gems, some real pearlers. Now at this stage after some thing like 25 years in the Toy business, I have to be honest, it takes quite a lot for me to find products exciting. I just feel like I've seen thousands (maybe even 10,000+) versions of the same or similiar things. I tend to focus on people more than products at trade shows nowadays.- But one really interesting angle India has is a culture of young-ish entrepeneurs starting new Toy Cos from a standpoint of merging educational development, fun play and some kind of tech angle.

I have worked with several of these companies, and I met a handful more at this show. These companies are oriented equally on the export opportunity as they are on the Indian domestic opportunity, the founders have often been educated in the USA or UK, and they are flexible, strategic and very clever in their approach.- One other experience I had at the show I want to share. I was invited to attend the Toy Company CEO's meeting held in the evening of the 3rd day of the show. The meeting was attended by luminaries from across the Toy industry, as well as a minister from Mr. Narendra Modi's government. Both Walmart & Amazon executives spoke about India's growth so far, and further growth prospects.

When I was asked to say a few words, I pointed out a few small things that could be changed to drive significant growth uplift in both the domestic & export markets. What was particularly interesting was that it is very clear that the Indian government is focused on the Toy industry as a potential driver of economic growth & employment for India’s vast potential workforce.

When I first visited India about 10 years ago, India was languishing at 142nd in the global ‘Ease of Doing Business’ index. In 2023 it had moved upto 63rd. It’s clear that India has a lot to do here, but the improvements I have observed across the last decade give me optimism.

On another note – if you are looking to sell into India, you will find you probably have to form both a manufacturing AND a distribution partnership, because currently tariffs on Toy imports are pretty heinous. This is kind of like the situation you get in some other regions of the world like South America or closer to home in Turkey, whereby regulatory frameworks, tariff regimes, currency weakness and or instability make it more practical to have someone manufacture your products in market. Clearly this makes it more likely that products without expensive tooling will prevail in the market, as it is often difficult to justify tooling on one developing market.

Ok, so to conclude – I had never been to the Toy Biz show before. In fact, despite being a regular visitor to India and considered to be part of the local ‘Toy scene’, I had not heard too much about the show. And I was very pleasantly surprised. The size and scale of the show and the quality of meetings and companies on show was much better than I anticipated, and I would definitely plan to return next time.