About the Writer
Arif Sheikh
A retail executive with 23 years experience, Arif Sheikh has earned great reputation among colleagues, clients & competitors through his ‘dedication’ & ‘aggressive strategies’ which - stimulate revenues, sale patterns, customer base and consistently drive organizations to reach celestial heights of success & profits. Sheikh has bagged many awards & accolades including - Dubai Shopping Festival Best Retail Chain / CEO Awards – 1999; Global Retail Forum; Pantaloon/VM&RD Design Awards – 2006 and Asia Retail Best Speaker Award – 2008 etc.
Sheikh has attended various retail forums in India and abroad as speaker apart from streak of retail articles and various publications, books on shopping mall etc.
Here’re few articles written by Arif Sheikh which we believe will help readers to grasp the gist of retail & real estate sector.
Mirage in the Retail Desert – Part I
Contrary to observed perception, I think retail still holds good. Following are a few known facts on retail and real estate to elaborate the viewpoint.
Retail Pointers
1. Biggest retail companies from USA took more than 10 to 15 years before rolling outside the country. Despite having worked in more or less homogeneous domestic market in terms of language and key business laws, they still failed in many markets as they could not adapt and customize to new market needs. Though they had developed supply chain facility, mature vendors, strong private label brands even in t he markets that they entered.
Compare this with Indian retail companies which worked in such a heterogeneous market where nothing is common in terms of consumption pattern or psychographics across Delhi and Chennai or Kolkata and Jaipur, a rudimentary supply chain and no national vendors or transporters, and adversarial laws against serious investments preventing access to global funds. Nevertheless, we have successfully operating national brands in all four corners of the country, in infancy stages. Despite the bumpy terrain, there are players like Future Group, Shoppers Stop, Landmark, Westside and many more who successfully came out of even the global meltdown, facing fierce competition, with high penetration of 11 million outlets across the country. Moreover, post recession, most modern retailers are wiser, cautious and more mature and the vendors have also learnt to align there cost and supply chains laong with retailers’ business modules From here, Indian retail will take a higher growth trajectory.
2. Given India’s leading business houses, with visionary leadership, such as Reliance (entertainment & retail), Tata, Birl, Bharti, and RPG whom investors in t his country trused time and again and who rarely let down the business stake holders – it would be naïve to think that all of them would go wrong in retail as not only have they already invested in this business but are also putting in more for future growth.
3. From the earlier developer-driven market to a completely retailer-driven scenario of the last one year, some semblance is now reached where both segments of the business are constructing deals which are not tilted in any one party’s favour. This will not only rebuild the confidence of quality retail real estate constructions so as to not halt new projects, but also provide retailers with good properties to choose from and realistic occupancy cost providing more funds for future expansion and consolidation. Over the last few years, revenue sharing experience in all regions across various retail formats also provided a spectrum of revenue share modules to choose from, rather than just working on guestimates favoring only one-half of both sides.
This article was published in ‘Shopping Center News Jan-Feb 2010 issue.
