One-stop-shop for retailers

Sanjiv Khullar, CEO, Avery Dennison (India), talks about solutions the company provides to retailers and growth plans in an interview to the Retailer

Retailer: How do you introduce Avery Dennison?

Sanjiv Khullar(SK): Avery Dennison is a global leader in providing pressure sensitive technology and brand identification and price marking solutions for the retail industry. Based in Pasadena, California, Avery Dennison is a US Fortune 500 company with sales in 2007 amounting to $ 6.3 billion (approximately Rs 252 billion). Avery Dennison employs more than 30,000 individuals (in over 60 countries), who develop, manufacture and market a wide range of products for both consumer and industrial markets. The company's businesses are organised in three segments. These are pressure-sensitive materials, office and consumer products and retail information services. In addition to these, the company has other specialty converting businesses, which comprise several businesses that produce postage stamps, battery labels, performance films and a variety of specialty tapes as well. In India, Avery Dennison has three manufacturing units in Bangalore, Delhi and Mumbai with sales offices in Delhi, Mumbai, Bangalore, Chennai and Tirupur.

Retailer: What are the retail solutions offered?

SK: Our product offering encompasses a wide range of solutions. These are price marking and brand identification (price tickets, barcodes, identity graphics, woven labels, printed fabric care labels, tagless (heat transfer) labels, patches), primary packaging (POS packaging solutions (boxes - corrugated and non-corrugated, poly bags), brand protection (security features, tracking and identification) and anti shrinkage / theft solutions (electronic article surveillance (EAS) solutions - soft / hard tags, reusable tags, source tagging solutions). Besides these, solutions offered include also supply chain management (info chain express (ICE), RFID solutions), in-store consumer experience enhancement (magic mirror) and tagging solutions (fasteners, tag guns).

Retailer: Where is your focus-area?

(SK): Our primary focus is on the apparel and home furnishings verticals. But, our product offering is quite diversified and relevant to other verticals like footwear, hard goods and lifestyle products.

Retailer: How do retailers procure products from Avery Dennison?

(SK): We operate in different countries through different ordering platforms depending on the end-user profile. For almost all the global retailers, the online ordering platform is the most preferred platform. However, in India, we also offer the traditional ordering platforms like email, fax, telephone and hard copy orders. We have a huge sales and customer service team, which accepts orders directly from the retailer or its merchandise supplier. Goods are manufactured in one of our units determined by the location of the customer. Then, we directly dispatch these to the customer.

Retailer: How do assess the performance of Indian retail market?

 (SK): Indian retail market is in the emerging market category. India's economic growth, at eight per cent in 2006, continues to support the retail industry. Estimated at $350 billion (approximately Rs 14,000 billion), the Indian retail market is expected to grow at 13 per cent. The top five retailers account for less than two per cent of the modern retail market. With the world’s largest middle class population, ever increasing salaries and spending power and with government policies encouraging global retailers to invest in India, the Indian retail market is definitely much more attractive than other overseas markets, which are suffering from a mix of saturation, recession, rising costs and lack of infrastructure.

Retailer: Do you gauge the demand of your solutions in India?

(SK): Avery Dennison is a preferred partner of most global retailers like Wal-Mart, Marks & Spencer, Gap Inc., Carrefour, JC Penney and Target. Thanks largely to its global presence, innovative product offering, global product consistency, and responsiveness to global and local needs of customers. We are confident that the global retailers would prefer to take advantage of our global relationship and our knowledge for their business and would extend this partnership to the Indian part of their business also. Our relationship with global retailers has been built through years of research, best practices mapping and implementation and ability to understand their needs and offer them customised solutions. We are confident that Indian retailers also would have to adopt these best practices in the areas we specialise in order to compete with global retailers and match global standards. Moreover, our USP of being the only ‘one stop shop’ in India for all these solutions offers to Indian retailers the convenience of leaving their needs in these areas to our experienced hands and channelise their energies and resources in other critical areas.

Retailer: What are you doing to be ahead of your competitors?

(SK): We have several competitors (global and local) in each of the areas that we specialise in. However, as mentioned earlier, none of these suppliers are capable of providing solutions in all the areas. We are the only supplier who can offer a ‘one stop window’ for all these solutions in India. Moreover, we are also quite unparalleled when it comes to size of operation, capacities and capabilities, sales and service infrastructure owing to our geographical spread and reach within the country and the leading edge technology that we offer.

Retailer: How do you see the growth of Avery Dennison in India?

(SK): Avery Dennison, as a corporation, has identified South Asia, especially India, as the most potential region for growth and investments (second only to China). With this vision, the company carved out South Asia as a separate region so as to bring focus on India, Bangladesh, Sri Lanka and Pakistan. The long-term vision of Avery Dennison is to have strong manufacturing capabilities both in the North and South, with service bureau set ups in each key manufacturing centre.