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, I’m airing it here because I believe it is also important to the future profitability of our readers’ 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…
Raghavendra Kamath , Business Standard 17 October 2011, Mumbai Global fashion brand Tommy Hilfiger says its newly refurbished 5,000 square feet store in Hyderabad is inspired by the brand’s first global flagship store on Fifth Avenue in New York City and the Champs-Elysées store in Paris, and reflects the décor and visual merchandising of those stores. Tommy Hilfiger, owned by clothing conglomerate PVH Corp, says it is also working on such makeover plans for its other stores in the country. Currently, it has 80 stores. Just two weeks before its flagship store in Hyderabad was reopened, Tommy Hilfiger announced that…
Amazon went public in 1997, when there were a total of 50 million internet users in the world. I remember making my first purchase on Amazon in 1998, and being delighted at the experience of finding something specific, quickly and conveniently. Over the next few months, a “revolutionary” fashion site in Europe – boo.com – raised and spent more than US$ 100 million of venture funding, and heralded a world under the domination of dotcoms. A few short months later, chatting with a journalist in New Delhi, I found that India too had caught the dotcom bug. We weighed the…
Speciality Restaurants expanding into high-margin QSR and cloud kitchen spaces - @devangshu shared his perspective on the opportunities and realities of managing a diverse "house of brands" in the food service sector #India #strategy #diversification
Geopolitical friction has again sparked renewed concerns over inflation and rising input costs for FMCG companies as @itmeansjustice @whysnavi write. @devangshu commented.
