The operating environment for the fashion retailers in India is only moving towards a more challenging and competitive direction even though the market is yet to mature. The market has grown over the last two decades on account of brand proliferation and developing retail network and more recently due to new product category creations. High consumer awareness and exposure to international trends has cut the product life cycles short. Topping this up, the last 12-18 months has witnessed the growth of the online platform offering an alternate, convenient and cost effective shopping option for consumers. It is necessary that fashion…
Subir Ghosh Asian Correspodent , 27 October 2011 Indian retailers suffered the highest loss of stocks to theft in the world for the fifth year in a row in 2011. Half of this loss was attributed to shoplifting by customers. The silver lining here was that India is the world’s only country where the shrink rate (loss of stocks because of thefts by customer, employees and supplier) came down in 2011, according to the Global Retail Theft Barometer 2011. The shrink rate as a percentage of sales was 2.38 per cent, costing local retailers Rs 3,470 crore, according to the…
Writankar Mukherjee, Atmadip Ray & Pramugdha Mamgain Kolkata/New Delhi, 24 October 2011 Retailers are countering the economic slowdown by offering interest-free equated monthly instalment (EMI) schemes, which they say are not only helping them pull customers into stores but also encouraging shoppers to buy higher value products. Such EMI-based sales promotions have staged a big comeback at a time near double-digit inflation has put a heavy strain on household budgets, making people defer non-urgent and big-ticket purchases even on credit because of hardening interest rates. But transactions carrying zero percent financing have grown more than 50% over the past year,…
Srikanth Srinivas with Suneera Tandon 22 October 2011 Sanjeev Narula could say his fight with private equity (PE) investors Bain Capital and TPG is a Lilliput versus Gulliver saga. The managing director of Lilliput Kidswear, an apparel retailer that until recently was a success story, got into a fight with his principal investors over the veracity of the company’s audited accounts that were presented at a board meeting on 28 September. Details are scant, but what appears to be a whistleblower call about fudged accounting, just as the company was readying to file a draft red herring prospectus (DRHP) ahead…
At the outset, let me say that this is the personal complaint of a consumer. However, Iโm airing it here because I believe it is also important to the future profitability of our readersโ businesses. Over the last few years I have felt increasingly uncomfortable with the noise in public and commercial spaces. It may be that my sensitivity to this has increased with age, but it is a fact that noise levels have also increased dramatically in every urban public space around us. In fact, it has reached a point where I now feel that people involved in the…
Geopolitical friction has again sparked renewed concerns over inflation and rising input costs for FMCG companies as @itmeansjustice @whysnavi write. @devangshu commented.
