C&L October 2017_LR (5)

EDITORIAL
Shyamanuja Das
shyamanuja.das@9dot9.in
The game
is wide
open…
U
nlike many other areas—most notably banking
and telecom—India’s organized retail is nowhere
close to its counterparts in developed and even
many developing markets. Significant part of
Indian retail activities happens in small outlets,
either single stores or hyper local chains. There’s
a garment store chain which calls itself a ‘giant’ of
West Delhi. Five years ago, it was one store. Now,
it has at least four outlets that I know of.
With this kind of fragmented market, it was not
surprising that the first real pan Indian brand was
built by the online retailers. Flipkart, Snapdeal,
Amazon…why even Jabong/Myntra…are top of
mind brands in Raipur, Vizag and Bhubaneswar!
Which retail brand can claim to have that kind of
mind share – except probably the good old Bata?
So, you cannot really blame investors when they
threw their money behind the Indian online retail
opportunity. The top three Indian private companies—all
Unicorns—are retail companies—two
of them pure play retail (Flipkart, Snapdeal); the
third (One97/Paytm) is now getting there quite
aggressively. Flipkart is also the largest retail
unicorn globally.
While the first (half-hearted) foray into online
business by the large organized retail vendors
some time back was quite a non-story, this time
they claim they have had a change of heart. It
seems that they are transforming their entire
business and ‘online venture’ is not a project led
by a couple of bright mid-level guys. That is what
Shubhra’s cover story suggests.
That is a good start—even if the ‘transformation’ is
just a wish. At least, give it to them for the thought.
The online retailers started with some real
As retail becomes more of
a technology-leveraged
business—we will see
tighter integration of online
business with the rest of it
innovation based on local needs—like Flipkart
addressing the gaps that existed in logistics. But
somewhere on the way, they seemed to have lost
the direction. Maybe, it was plenty of funding,
maybe something else... I would argue that good
competition from the offline retailers could have
prevented that.
Even now, the game is wide open. As retail
becomes more of a technology-leveraged business—we
will see tighter integration of online
business with the rest of it.
That will make it a real competition. The Tata
CLiQ example makes one hopeful.
Let it be more exciting. India is a high growth
market. And there’s enough room for everyone.
October 2017 | CIO&LEADER
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