By VISHAL KRISHNA Businessworld 20 Feb. 2009 Lesser stock on display racks in your neighbourhood Subhiksha, and may have started going elsewhere instead. One fine day, you may have even noticed that the shop was shut. What happened was this: Chennai-based value retailer Subhiksha Trading Services, neck-deep in Rs 600 crore of debt (plus Rs 180 crore raised internally as shareholders’ funds) accumulated over the past three years, could not pay its vendors as all its earnings was going to service the debt. So, over the past six months, it temporarily shut all 1,600 of its outlets in 110 cities.…
About 7 months ago a spat occurred between the leading retail company in India Future Group and branded supplier Cadbury's, with respect to margins offered to the Future Group. (A friend described it as a Bollywood saga.) Future Group had also previously had run-ins with other suppliers including the likes of Pepsi. (The previous post is here.) Nowย there's a European film noire sequel in the making, in a battle between the Belgian retailer Delhaize and European FMCG big daddy Unilever. Delhaize has suspended purchases from Unilever as, according to Delhaize, Unilever is making "unacceptable demands" that the chain stock more…
Online retailer Zappos is planning to introduce customizable web pages, and that has attracted all kinds of commentary - warm & welcoming as well as dismissive. The big question is "what is the customization and how it is being offered". My rule is simple: web-page customization has to drive simplification of the shopping experience. Changing skins, page layout, and other cosmetic stuff may keep novelty-seekers happy - for some time, that is. But the average user will find that it is just another thing too many on the already over-full to-do list. Simplification of the user-friendly sort has to be…
Cisco's John Chambers is calling the current economic scenario "the biggest opportunity of our lifetime", and asking managers to shift from a centralised approach to a more collaborative one. Of course, Cisco as a company has much to gain from the growth of collaborative network organisational models, but he does have a point. But will it be simple to make that shift? After decades, maybe centuries, of command-and-control behaviour training from kindergarten, it will take more than a few months for people to learn how to collaborate. Remember the management adage: "Lead, be led or get out of the way"?…
The internet seems to be as much alien territory for bricks and mortar retailers as catalogues are. Bricks and mortar retailers seem to struggle with the mediumย - most of them try to graduate from their corporate web brochures to transaction sites, and end up doing injustice to both. Many of them are not able to figure out how to create the traffic to their online store, how to create the excitement and liveliness to convert their traffic into transactions, and how to take the transactions to their final closure in terms of payment and delivery in a delightful way. Of…
Geopolitical friction has again sparked renewed concerns over inflation and rising input costs for FMCG companies as @itmeansjustice @whysnavi write. @devangshu commented.
