Our Bureau

Mumbai , Sept. 15

THURSDAY'S sessions at the India Retail Forum saw retailers raring to have their say.

While the same retailers spewed the same figures, there was a great deal of consensus on how retail would grow in India.

One was that retail space was set to grow. Small formats would graduate to larger spaces. According to Mr Noel Tata, Managing Director, Trent, the near future would see intense competition among players, in similar product categories and eventually, but inevitably, retail format sizes would become larger. He was speaking at a workshop at the India Retail Forum (IRF),

A more crucial question was how to develop and manage a mall. A number of malls were well-designed ones and clearly had long-term goals.

A point that Mr Kishore Biyani, Managing Director, Pantaloon Retail, concurred with. He said that developers had not considered development from the consumer's point of view, only considering the maximisation of their returns. Consumer-centric developments always did better.

He said that the Indian market currently had about 50 million sq ft of retail space to offer and Pantaloon Retail had signed up for 20 per cent of that space. It currently has 2.1 million sq ft in retail space and wants to double this by next year.

Interestingly, Mr Biyani and Mr Arun Nanda, Executive Director, Mahindra and Mahindra, agreed that domestic retailers needed to be different — offer an ethnic ambience rather than import concepts and parrot what had worked in the West.

Mr Nanda said the least attention was given to rural customers and this was a key area, that if addressed would reap huge dividends.

He said that the domestic shopping experience was doing little to improve purchases from tourists. It was important to promote Indian products, textiles and handicrafts, especially when it was currently the global flavour. Tourists needed to be assured that they would not be cheated, that they could trust the product's quality. He suggested regular melas resembling a Dilli Haat.

He urged major improvements in packaging of products meant for tourists, ridding the sector of middlemen to lower prices and improve quality.

Mr Hital Meswani, Executive Director, Reliance Industries, also highlighted the changing dynamics in his company. He said Reliance Industries' plans in retailing included significantly raising the number of petrol stations across the country. The company was currently opening four stations almost everyday and is planning to raise this to about 1,500-2,000 outlets by mid-2006.

Mr Krish Iyer, CEO, Piramyd Retail, said: "The organised retail industry in India is merely 3 per cent which only highlights the huge opportunity and is poised to grow to Rs 1,10,000 crore by 2010."

The key challenges would be driving growth through employment generation and demographic transition. With the services sector leading the robust GDP growth in the past decade, he said that the retail sector would be the next big thing for India.

The favourable factors such as very high GRDI (Global Retail Development Index) and FDICI (Foreign Direct Investment Confidence Index) as specified in a recent AT Kearney report highlights the fact that India is the world's most attractive retail market ahead of China.

However, huge investment is required to realise the potential due to which FDI in retail needs to be seriously looked into. Also availability and management of talent as well as speedy implementation of plans is the need of the hour added Mr Iyer.

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