Online retail has a threat from us, says Kishore Biyani

Future Group Chief Executive Officer (CEO) Kishore Biyani on Monday said the muchbelieved burgeoning online retail sector in India had a threat from physical retail models like Big Bazaar and Easyday, owing to low business share and high cost of business of the former.

The retail champion said although the next trend is digitisation, but physical and digital are not different as layering of technology over physical is the need of the hour.

“Online retail has a threat from us and it’s time people realised that they are not a threat to us, as they don’t even have 1 per cent business share and the cost of doing business is also too high,” Biyani said.

Over the years, part of the retail consumers have moved to online platform such as Flipkart and Amazon for purchase of the daily use items.

“If you look world over, Alibaba is only buying physical retail, so is Amazon and therefore times have changed,” Biyani said adding that the fever of online shopping of consumer items by Indians have gone away.

The leading retail chain is on an aggressive expansion mode witnessing huge demand and had recently announced opening 10,000 member-only Easyday stores to make it a ~1.5-lakh crore business opportunity by 2022.

The group unveiled a 30year vision, Retail 3.0, by when it plans to become Asia's largest integrated consumer retailer by 2047 with revenue of in excess of $1 trillion.

Biyani said the fashion and food categories are seeing continuous demand with the fashion segment growing rapidly and chains such as FBB, Central and Brand Factory are in good shape. When asked about his views on online retail taking over physical retail, Biyani said both are converging and ten years from now everything will converge completely and the company has always been at the forefront, not missing any trend.