Now Rival Retailers Work under one roof

SHARING SPACE TO EXPAND SPECIALTY CHAINS

THEY are fierce rivals in the marketplace, but big retailers such as Future Group, Reliance Retail, RPG Retail and Aditya Birla Retail now tap each other’s synergies to expand their specialty chains.

So, walk into a ‘Central’ mall of Kishore Biyani’s Future Group and you may well see Reliance TimeOut, the gift-music-book format of Mukesh Ambani’s Reliance Retail. Reliance’s optical chain Vision Express shares some premises of Birla group’s ‘More’ hypermarkets, while RPG Retail has rolled out 20 Music World stores inside Future Group’s Big Bazaar outlets.
“Retailers have now realised that they alone cannot manage all categories on their own, how much hard they may try,” says Arvind Singhal, chairman of retail consultancy Technopak Advisors.
Future Group CEO Kishore Biyani says it’s a win-win model for both retailers and customers. “The retailers can exploit each other’s synergies in non-competing categories, which ultimately helps the customer get a wider choice from the same store,” he says. “We are open to locate our specialty stores in other’s premises, if such opportunities come up.”
There has been a flurry of deals and expansions in the $20-billion organized retail sector over the last five years since companies such as Reliance, Aditya Birla and Bharti entered the turf and started floating specialty chains on their own or in tieup with foreign players.
“There are obvious opportunities to associate with each other, provided the brand positioning of the stores match,” says Bijou Kurien, president and chief executive
(lifestyle) of Reliance Retail.
He says that this model of co-locating stores could emerge as a way to expand. “We understand each other’s issues like constraints in standalone expansion and profitability.”
The concept of shop-in-shop within largeformat stores such as hypermarkets is selling like hot cakes among garment and other single/limited product retailers because it saves them the cost of operating standalone stores and gives access to a captive consumer base of the large format.
Also, specialty shop-in-shop owners need not worry about associated costs like security, civil engineering and air-conditioning, says Mr Singhal of Technopak.
Retailers say running a shop-in-shop costs at least 25% less than a standalone shop of the same size.
These deals mostly follow a revenue-sharing model, but retailers say there is no standard formula on the percentage of revenue shared. It depends on the customer traffic the large store is able to drawn.
In some cases, there could be sharing of shop-floor employees, sharing of loyalty schemes and payment counters.
“The model of collaborative expansion will drive efficiencies,” says K Dasaratharaman, president (speciality retail) of RPG Retail, which plans to more than double the number of its music-and-movie chain Music World outlets inside Big Bazaar. “We are talking to few others like Aditya Birla Group to expand on this model,” he says.
Shoppers Stop vice-chairman B S Nagesh says the chain will explore this model to expand its book retail chain Crossword. “Distribution has emerged as the key point in the country,” he says.
Reliance Retail
Reliance DIGITAL — Consumer durable & information technology
Reliance TRENDS — Apparel & accessories
Reliance WELLNESS — Health, wellness & beauty
Reliance FOOTPRINT — Footwear
Reliance JEWELS — Jewellery
Reliance TIMEOUT — Books, music & entertainment
Reliance AUTOZONE — Automotive products & services
Reliance LIVING — Homeware, furniture, modular kitchens, furnishings SPECIALTY CHAINS OF BIG RETAILERS
Future Group
PLANET SPORTS — Sports lifestyle NAVARAS — Jewellery aLL — Fashion for plus-sized people DEPOT — Books
RPG Retail
MUSIC WORLD BOOKS & BEYOND
Tata Group
LANDMARK — Books, music, gifts, movie