Recession, a boon in disguise

Retailer: Considering the expansion plan under your scanner, how are you going about it?

Kabir Lumba (KL): We are looking forward to spend around Rs 500 crore between Lifestyle, Home Center, Bossini and Splash brands in the next couple of years. For FY11, we are aiming to get 30 Lifestyle stores, 20 Home Centre and around 10 Splash stores from their current numbers of 22, 11 and 6 respectively.

We got a very good response to our Jaipur store. We have plans to open stores in Jalandhar, Kanpur, Ludhiana, Nagpur and Coimbatore. For advertising our strategy is to use vernacular newspapers for communication or a combination of vernacular and English dailies.

As for now, Lifestyle covers a total retail space of 1.2 million sq feet.

Retailer: Lifestyle has always come up with stores at malls. Why so?

KL: We prefer a mall any day. I think that the mall has a better infrastructure with better parking facility. It offers better retail balance with carefully planned tenant mix.  So it becomes a lot more interesting for a customer to go in a mall rather than a high street. But having said that, there are also some high streets which are very interesting, and I would say that both co-exist. But if you ask me, my preference is a mall.

Retailer: What about the presence in the eastern part of the country?

KL: We are still waiting for the right kind of opportunity. As a brand Lifestyle, we have to go to the right kind of a mall with right kind of facilities, which can serve our purpose. We’ll go for phase wise expansion plan. We started very strongly in the south, moved to the west again very strongly, and now we are back with north observing a lot more action. So, hopefully within the next couple of years we should be very strong in the south west and north with ready to touch base in the east.

Retailer: Your perception about the market slowdown and its effect.

KL: Interestingly, when the slowdown happened our business grew faster. We had put up amazingly against the effect of the recession. We had to come up with certain changes in the product offerings as well as the price points. We knew that the consumer then was very price sensitive. But then we had a strong business growth in 2009-10 and we are retaining the same growth in the financial year 10-11 as well.

So recession was like a blessing in disguise.

Retailer: Your views on FDI in multi brand retail.

KL: We strongly feel that the retail industry creates tremendous employment opportunities and any industry that creates this kind of employment is very good for the economy. A strong investment done through FDI is always going to help the industry to reach the next level. Our expansion plans are based on the kind of opportunities the Indian market has to offer in terms of FDI. But then again you can just evaluate or talk about what all can be done. We have been hearing a lot about FDI, but actually nothing much has been happening in this regard. There is no paper which says that this is what you can expect when the FDI is out and this is what you can expect from the industry.

Retailers: How’s the growth of Lifestyle in the last 5 years and how it’s going to be in the next 5 years?

KL: In fact for the last five years, including this financial year, we have taken our business four times from Rs 340 crore. It’s now a Rs 1500-1600 crore business. And in the next five years time we would look to grow to a Rs 3000 crore business, with presence across the country through our multiple format stores. We hope to be present in tier II cities as well by that time.