• Home
  • News
  • Business
  • Retailers to deal with internal challenges in the New Year

Retailers to deal with internal challenges in the New Year

By Sujata Sachdeva

loading...

Scroll down to read more

Despite reporting positive like-for-like sales growth in the September quarter, leading retailers such as Future Retail and Shoppers Stop will have a lot to deal with in the New Year. Apart from challenges posed by the online retailers and slow consumer sentiment when it comes to buying fresh stocks, Shoppers Stop will have to manage the financials of its subsidiary Hypercity and Future Retail, its high interest costs.

While both chains have performed well on a like-to-like basis with Future Retail primarily operating Big Bazaar reporting 14.1 percent growth and home and consumer durables chains Home Town and eZone clocking in 7.8 percent while Shoppers Stop’s department stores saw 11 percent growth. However, beyond this quarter, both need good number of footfall to sustain improvement in performance and better sales. Investors hope that the expected improvement in the country’s gross domestic product (GDP) will help improve consumer demand but they say this would only happen from the second half of the next fiscal.

What’s more, the sudden growth of e-commerce and flurry of online players are creating a threat with consumers preferring to grab online deals offered by the retailers. So e-commerce is turning out to be the biggest challenge for offline players in 2015.

Future Retail
Shoppers Stop