The UK's Marks & Spencer (M&S) has plans to position itself as a mid-market mass retailer in India and is eyeing a chunk of its revenues from India in the next few years. M&S has severed its partnership with Planet Retail and has entered into a deal with Reliance Retail. Its existing stores will be absorbed in the current partnership eventually. M&S will be positioned as a mid-market retailer in India. It chose Reliance as it moves quickly in its line of businesses.
The roll out of Reliance Retail's fresh food format stores has hit a wall in West Bengal, where a key constituent of the state government is against big businesses entering agriculture and allied fields.
Even in the face of protests from trade groups, escalating real estate costs and pressure on margins, the march of domestic retail chains continues unabated.
The way the story went, customers would get dramatically lower prices for everyday groceries (something that takes up 45 per cent of the household budget) and farmers would earn at least a third or more as big retailers began procuring from them directly. But none of this has really happened, and may not either.
The potential of India's retail sector may be huge and growing, but soaring rentals, salaries and interest rates could make the journey a bumpy ride for retailers in the near term.
Traders protests against Reliance Fresh may impact Reliance Retail's Rs 3,000 crore (Rs 30 billion)plan to roll out retail and fresh food stores in Orissa.
The delay in setting up distribution centres and central processing centres for its fresh produce and FMCG products has pushed back Reliance Retail's new store openings in Mumbai and surrounding areas.
Despite the onslaught from big retail chains, small kirana shops could get a lifeline from the Indian Institute of Packaging.
Reliance Retail Ltd launched operations of its Reliance Fresh in Uttar Pradesh with the launch of ten stores in Lucknow. These ten stores will open in different localities in Lucknow on Wednesday.
Kartaar Singh, a farmer of Mokha village in Punjab's Kapurthala district, used to travel about 50 km on his scooter to Jalandhar's new sabzi mandi, or wholesale vegetable market, to sell his vegetables every day.
Reliance Retail, already creating ripples in the organised domestic retail market, is poised to acquire smaller rivals in order to take on serious competition from the likes of Bharti-Wal-Mart combine.
Reliance Industries Ltd, which rolled out its first retail store Reliance Fresh on Friday, may start futures trading to mitigate the price risk but the move depends on achieving sufficient volumes after expansion of the retail format.\n
Mukesh Ambani-owned Reliance Retail on Thursday opened its first exclusive apparel store under the 'Reliance Trends' brand in Gurgaon as it moves ahead with its Rs 25,000 crore ( Rs 250 billion) retail juggernaut.Besides housing a variety of international brands like Lee, Wrangler and Reebok, 'Reliance Trends' will also have a fair share of private label in various categories.
Billionaire Mukesh Ambani's retail venture will soon start selling electronics goods like refrigerators, TVs and computers, even as it prepares to open its 100th fresh food and vegetables outlet in the country.
"Big retail outlets are welcome. We have got no doubt about it. Our experience in the past one year is that they are able to give better price to farmers and they are able to give consumers better products at an affordable cost," CM Y S R Reddy said.
Kirana shops and greengrocers have found a new challenge to grapple with.
The sources said the company had provisioned to open one or two new stores every month during this financial year. The hypermarkets will offer a range of digital, food and lifestyle products.
Reliance Retail on Monday ushered in a new retail culture in the national capital region by opening nine western-style food stores as it hopes to become the preferred supplier of push-cart vendors and kirana stores.
The investments include the supply chain, but exclude real estate component.
In large format outlets such as Croma, E-zone and Reliance Retail, digital cameras are only next to cellphones in drawing customer traffic, say industry experts.
Reliance, Bharti's response to Ahmedabad's space crunch.
Investment Advisor, PN Vijay believes that is enjoying the high margins, which refining industries are getting all over the world but going forward, investors will be looking at Reliance's retail foray.
Reliance Industries Ltd announced on Tuesday a big-ticket expansion in retailing business, which would have presence in 1,500 cities across India at an investment of about Rs 25,000 crore (Rs 250 billion) generating over 1000,000 new jobs.
As India's online population crosses 450 million, e-commerce ventures are trying to grab a pie of online sales estimated to hit $48 billion by 2020.
Patanjali Ayurved, founded in 2007 by yoga guru Ramdev, is targeting Rs 10,000-crore (Rs 100-billion) revenue in 2016-17
Kishore Biyani led-Future Group has filed a caveat before the Delhi high court requesting it to be heard if any plea is filed by e-commerce major Amazon over its Rs 24,713 crore deal with Mukesh Ambani-led RIL. Anticipating a move by Amazon, which had got an interim arbitration award in its favour, putting the announced deal on hold, the Future Group firm has moved the Delhi high court.
The store segmentation approach that Shoppers Stop is taking is intended to improve its hit rate at a time when local and international fashion retailers are crowding the market with new merchandise across price points.
It had signed a joint venture with Reliance Retail to form M&S Reliance India Private Limited in April 2008.
RIL is setting up infrastructure for a full-fledged horizontal e-commerce offering - internally called the New Commerce - to simultaneously launch pan-India by October-November.
Jio's global partnerships took shape this year when Jio Platforms, a 100 per cent subsidiary of Reliance Jio which has invested in various digital platforms, was able to woo a bevy of marquee investors: Facebook, Google, Qualcomm, Intel, and a numerous PE funds.
The sale of Nature's Basket, Godrej's chain of food stores in west India, is the second exit by a big group in a year in the category
Although Walmart-Flipkart wholesale game-plan is to target about a $150 billion market out of a total pie of $700 billion in the country, the consolidation marks the end of the multi-brand dream of the American retail giant.
