Introduction -
Retail means selling goods and services in small quantities directly to customers. Retailing consists of all activities involved in marketing of goods and services directly to consumer for their personal, family and household use.
The Indian retailing industry is becoming intensely competitive, as more and more players are vying for the same set of customers. Although still at a nascent stage, organized retailing in India is witnessing a radical transformation. The increase in the number of retail chains across the country is an indication that organized retailing is emerging as an industry and will boom in a big way in the near future.
Retailing is one of the biggest sectors and it is witnessing a revolution in India. The new entrant in retailing in India signifies the beginning of retail revolution. The Windows of Opportunity shows that Retailing in India was at opening stage in 1995 and now it is in peaking stage in 2006. India shows a retail market of US$330 billion that is expected to grow 10% a year, with modern retailing just beginning.
The Indian Retail Scene
India is a country having one of the most unorganized retail markets. Traditionally it is a family’s livelihood, with their shop in the front and house at the back, while they run the retail business. More than 99% retailers function in less than 500 square feet of shopping space. The Indian retail sector is estimated at around Rs 900,000 crore, of which the organized sector accounts for a mere 2 per cent indicating a huge potential market opportunity that is lying in the waiting for the consumer-savvy organized retailer. Purchasing power of Indian urban consumer is growing and branded merchandise in categories like Apparels, Cosmetics, Shoes, Watches, Beverages, Food and even Jewellery, are slowly becoming lifestyle products that are widely accepted by the urban Indian consumer. Indian retailers need to take advantage of this growth and aim to grow, diversify and introduce new formats and have to pay more attention to the brand building process. The emphasis here is on retail as a brand rather than retailers selling brands. The focus should be on branding the retail business itself. In their preparation to face fierce competitive pressure, Indian retailers must come to recognize the value of building their own stores as brands to reinforce their marketing positioning, to communicate quality as well as value for money. Sustainable competitive advantage will be dependent on translating core values combining products, image and reputation into a coherent retail brand strategy. There is no doubt that the Indian retail scene is booming. A number of large corporate houses — Tata’s, Raheja’s, Piramals’s, Goenka’s — have already made their foray into this arena, with beauty and health stores, supermarkets, self-service music stores, newage book stores, every-day-low-price stores, computers and peripherals stores, office equipment stores and home/building construction stores. Every retail category has been attacked, by the organized players today. The Indian retail scene has witnessed too many players in too short a time, crowding several categories without looking at their core competencies, or having a well thought out branding strategy. To illustrate, the Indianlifestyle/fashion retail scene is already exhibiting the following characteristics, which do not augur well for its future.
Lack of store differentiation: Leading retail stores like Shoppers Stop, Lifestyle, Ebony, Globus, and Pyramid, offer common brands, similar ambience, and a commitment to improved service. Where is the scope for differentiation and brand building?
Merchandising muddle: Some retailers have still been able to maintain their ground in the market inspite of the arrival of new entrants. This is because these retailers exploit what they know best — what the customer wants with regard to product, selection and price — and ensure their customers do not go back disappointed. Consumer insights built over their years of Experience in business is helping them to hold the fort against the onslaught of the new players on the horizon. India’s cultural diversity poses additional challenges to the merchandisers requiring them to be aware of local tastes and to be able to compete with the local retailer in terms of market knowledge and speed of response. While technology and systems are no doubt enablers, there can be little substitute for experience and insight.
Lack of labels/suppliers: Organized Indian retailing has to face the situation of lack of professional suppliers who are accustomed to deadlines, systematic in their production and consistent with their quality. Often, the local suppliers do not have financial strength or production infrastructure or discipline. Indian merchandisers are forced to compromise due to a true lack of choice — which leads to huge unsold stocks and reduced profitability to the retailers.
Discounting: Given widespread availability of the same brands, large retailers have to cope with the phenomenon of discounts offered by the smaller retailers. In a middle class dominated, price-sensitive market like India, price manipulation is a strong weapon in the arsenal of the small independent retailer. The large retailers themselves further dilute the strength of the retail market. Deep price cuts may not be the answer to maintain their relevance against the small retailers nor does it auger well for the brand building of the store.
Limited margins and high real estate costs: Cost of prime land for the retail store is prohibitive. Land prices in prime localities across the metros have themselves become a major deterrent to sustaining a profitable retailing model for organized players. A number of the new chains have therefore preferred to spread in smaller metros, hoping to offset lower revenue potential with lower real estate costs.
‘Time abundant’ consumers: In recent years, it would seem that the consumer has thrown the adage ‘time is money’ to the winds. The customer is willing to spend more time if he/she is getting a better deal. Scarcity of time seems to be the prerogative only of a few consumers.
Challenges of Retailing in India
In India the Retailing industry has a long way to go, and to become a truly flourishing industry, retailing needs to cross the following hurdles.
* The first challenge facing the organized retail sector is the competition from unorganized sector.
* In retail sector, Automatic approval is not allowed for foreign investment.
* Taxation, which favors small retail businesses.
* Developed supply chain and integrated IT management is absent in retail sector.
* Lack of trained work force.
* Low skill level for retailing management.
* Intrinsic complexity of retailing- rapid price changes, threat of product obsolescence and low margins.
Growth drivers in India for retail sector
o Rising incomes and improvements in infrastructure are enlarging consumer markets and accelerating the convergence of consumer tastes.
o Liberalization of the Indian economy
o Increase in spending Per capita Income.
o Advent of dual income families also helps in the growth of retail sector.
o Shift in consumer demand to foreign brands like McDonalds, Sony, Panasonic, etc.
o Consumer preference for shopping in new environs
o The Internet revolution is making the Indian consumer more accessible to the growing influences of domestic and foreign retail chains. Reach of satellite T.V. channels is helping in creating awareness about global products for local markets.
o About 47% of India's population is under the age of 20; and this will increase to 55% by 2015. This young population, which is technology-savvy, watch more than 50 TV satellite channels, and display the highest propensity to spend, will immensely contribute to the growth of the retail sector in the country.
o Availability of quality real estate and mall management practices
o Foreign companies' attraction to India is the billion-plus population.
Different Forms of Retailing: Emergence of new formats of retailing in India
Popular Formats
o Hyper marts
o Large supermarket
o Mini supermarkets
o Convenience store
o Discount/shopping list grocer
o Traditional retailers trying to reinvent by introducing self-service formats as well as value-added services such as credit, free home delivery etc.
The Indian retail sector can be broadly classified into:
a) Food Retailers
b) Health and beauty Products
c) Clothing and Footwear
d) Home Furniture & Household goods
e) Durable goods
f) Leisure & Personal Goods
Malls in India:
Over the last 2-3 years, the Indian consumer market has seen a significant growth in the number of modern-day shopping centers, popularly known as ‘malls’. There is an increased demand for quality retail space from a varied segment of large-format retailers and brands, which include food and apparel chains, consumer durables and multiplex operators.
Retail as an Employment Generator
The retail sector can generate huge employment opportunities, and can lead to job-led economic growth. In most major economies, ‘services’ form the largest sector for creating employment. The retail sector in India employs nearly 21 million people, accounting for roughly 6.7% of the total employment. However, employment in organized retailing is still very low, because of the small share of organized retail business in the total Indian retail trade. The share of organized retailing in India, at around 2%, is abysmally low, compared to 80% in the USA, 40% in Thailand, or 20% in China, thus leaving the huge market potential largely untapped. A modern retail/retail services sector has the potential of creating over 2 million new (direct) jobs within the next 6 years in the country (assuming only 8-10% share of organized retailing), according to Arvind Singhal, CMD, KSA Technopak. Retail can create as many new jobs as the BPO/ITES sector in India. A strong retail front-end can also provide the necessary fillip to agriculture & food processing, handicrafts, and small & medium manufacturing enterprises, creating millions of new jobs indirectly. Through its strong linkages with sectors like tourism and hospitality, retail has the potential of creating jobs in these sectors also.
The Global Retail Scenario
Retail has played a major role world over in increasing productivity across a wide range of consumer goods and services .The impact can be best seen in countries like U.S.A., U.K., Mexico, Thailand and more recently China. Economies of countries like Singapore, Malaysia, Hong Kong, Sri Lanka and Dubai are also heavily assisted by the retail sector. Retail is the second-largest industry in the United States both in number of establishments and number of employees. It is also one of the largest world-wide. The retail industry employs more than 22 million Americans and generates more than $3 trillion in retail sale annually. Retailing is a U.S. $7 trillion sector. Wal-Mart is the world’s largest retailer. Already the world’s largest employer with over 1million associates, Wal-Mart displaced oil giant Exxon Mobil as the world’s largest
Company when it posted $219 billion in sales for fiscal 2001. Wal-Mart has become the most successful retail brand in the world due its ability to leverage size, market clout, and efficiency to create market dominance. Wal-Mart heads Fortune magazine list of top 500 companies in the world. Forbes Annual List of Billionaires has the largest number (45/497) from the retail business.
Global Retail V/s Indian Retail
Large format retail businesses dominate the retail landscape in the United States and across Europe, in terms of retail space, categories, range, brands, and volumes. Indian retail industry cannot hope to learn much by merely looking at the Western success stories in retail. Their scales of operations are very huge, the profit margins that they earn are also much higher and they operate in multiple formats like discount stores, warehouses, supermarkets, departmental stores, hyper-markets, convenience stores and specialty stores. The economy and lifestyle of the West is not in line with that of India and hence the retailing scene in India has not evolved in the same format as the West nor can we learn valuable lessons from their style of operations. In retailing, the conventional wisdom used to be, that, the critical success factor was location. But precise location no longer matters and geo-demographics are increasingly becoming irrelevant. The leading multiple chain retailers, superstores and malls create their own centers of gravity, attracting customers by car, bus, train or even by plane to wherever they are located. The following factors still pose a challenge for the Indian retailers:
Geographic saturation
The end of the nineties has signified a turning tide of retailer power. The limit to retail ambition is geographic saturation. Many retailers have started postponing their store expansion plans. The track record of some of their international store expansions is also not promising.
Category killer competition
The threat of saturation is accompanied by a new competition from the low cost category killers. Specialist competition is eating away at the market share and forcing down the prices and gross margins of the multiple chains.
Alternative shopping channels
The newest retail format that is showing growth and is more frightening for retailers than for consumers, is the internet. The potential for on-line shopping which is growing questions retailers’ investments in more physical sites and stores and makes it imperative that they too explore the new agenda of ‘E-retailing’ or ‘e-tailing’.
Conclusion
Many agencies have estimated differently about the size of organized retail market in 2010. The one thing that is common amongst these estimates is that Indian organized retail market will be very big in 2010.The current need of the hour in Indian Retail is developing a sound distribution channel and infrastructure. The status of the retail industry will depend mostly on external factors like Government regulations and policies and real estate prices. Besides the activities of retailers, demands of the customers will also impact the retail industry. By keeping these various parameters, it can be surely predicted that in the upcoming years, India will be the place to watch out for!! .
