The Bharti-Walmart
split has been creating quite a buzz in the business circles and fortunately or
unfortunately, Indians would have to wait for some time to get a ‘feel’ of
Walmart in India. The world’s largest Retail store has developed cold feet over
its venture in India owing to some “Investment Issues” as quoted by the company
officials; but experts tend to differ. Now before developing a postmortem on
why the Bharti-Walmart venture failed, we would take you on a tour of the
Indian Retail Industry with the aid of a series of blog posts. We will discuss
its contribution to the Indian economy, the underlying forces that shape up the
Indian Retail Business, the trends and of course the future perspective.
Indian Retail is one of
the most blossoming industries in India with an estimated size of $500 billion
and a contribution ranging from 14-15% to the national GDP. The peculiar fact
about this industry is that 90% of the retail players hail from the unorganized
sector. This statistics sound as an encouragement for the bigger organized players
who are growing at a rate of 20% per year. Interestingly, the industry is not
confined to brick-and-mortar retail and has a significant presence in
cyberspace. With the third largest population of netizens, after China and USA,
the Retail industry giants can look up to India as a lucrative proposition. Amazon’s
venture has just shown the green signal for other retail companies to flock the
nation. The online Retail market in India is estimated to be $8.19 billion
which has shown a growth of 65% over the previous year. The emergence of
foreign players is expected in the near future, but the domestic players are
also getting involved in the sector. Sahara has launched Sahara Q shops in the
Delhi/NCR region and they are planning to go amass by setting up more than 900
stores by 2015. With majors like Villeroy & Boch and Bulgari queuing up for entry, the Indian
Retail industry is going to witness cut-throat competition in near future. In other
words, we should be expecting a ‘Retail Boom’ in a couple of years.
In our next post, we
will have a look into the trends of our Retail Customers and their buying behavior.
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