Biyani Borrows From Walmart For His Next Big Push
Future Group looks to disrupt retail as Biyani eyes $1 lakh crore opportunity.
Kishore Biyani is marrying Walmart’s Sam’s Club with the neighbourhood kirana store for his next big expansion.
The company will open 10,000 member-only smaller outlets by 2022, each after every 2 kilometres, Biyani said today announcing the plan. The operator of Big Bazaar hypermarkets and Easyday stores tied up with Google and Facebook for it.
The search and analytics giant will help it identify the locations to set up the outlets. And the social media platform will share users’ name and location data, besides allowing customers to order via WhatsApp and make payments at the time of delivery.
For Rs 999 a year, 2,000 people will be allowed to take membership of each store. In return, they will get a 10 percent discount on every bill. Its 700 Easyday outlets of 2,000 square feet each will also be converted into club stores.
Biyani, who burnt nearly Rs 300 crore in Future Group’s e-commerce foray in 2007, is preparing for a bigger battle for India’s household consumption. The $672-billion retail market is expected to cross $1.1 trillion by 2020, CARE Ratings said in a June report. And Jeff Bezos-led online retail giant Amazon, already looking to disrupt food retail globally, is not the only risk. Back home, Mukesh Ambani’s Reliance Industries Ltd. with its own retail chain and a data-driven telecom operations poses an equally big challenge.
Biyani is learning from the mistakes of the current e-commerce models and is trying to leverage Future Group’s own retail presence, said Arvind Singhal, chairman of retail consultant Technopak Advisors. “The quality of data available with Facebook and Google will help Future Group in new store openings as well as customise the merchandise mix more accurately location by location.”
That’s part of Biyani’s 30-year vision called ‘retail 3.0’ to turn Future Retail into a trillion-dollar company.