Essilor sharpens initiatives to tap rural buyers
By Sangeetha G. Feb 16 2015
Tags: News
Leading ophthalmic optics company Essilor is deploying several rural initiatives to grow the market. It hopes to reach out to at least half of the population which does not have access to ophthalmic optics by 2025.
The onus of developing the market largely falls on the leader. In the case of Essilor, there is a huge untapped market - of the 500 million people who need vision correction only 100 million have access to ophthalmic lenses. Essilor has been taking up initiatives to reach out to the rural population.
Essilor is training unemployed or underemployed youth in remote villages to conduct refractive tests. After the short-term course, the youth are encouraged to start micro enterprises in their respective villages. While they have to take care of the basic infrastructure, Essilor offers them refractive lenses and equipment. Essilor has trained around 500 such youth and over 400 of them have started such micro enterprises in remote villages of Uttar Pradesh and Rajastan.
“We will be expanding the programme to cover villages in other states as well. The youth go for asset-light enterprises by either conducting door-to-door tests or setting up a testing centre at homes,” said Jayanth Bhuvaraghan, managing director of Essilor India.
source : http://www.mydigitalfc.com/news/essilor-sharpens-initiatives-tap-rural-buyers-692
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