Think BIG – Reliance in Retailing

Being a follower of the retail industry, I typically keep abreast when time permits of news on this. However, I have to confess, the speed and scope of Reliance’s initiatives in retailing have completely taken me by surprise. I first saw Reliance “fresh” stores mushrooming all over Bangalore – the long/ traffic stopping queues bore testimony to their popularity – we heard of the “sabzi mandi” (wholesale fresh produce markets) vendors cribbing because they were suffering big time losses. Within no time, we saw the Reliance Footprint store springing up at strategic locations, the Reliance Wellness format (with tie ups for eye care), as well as the Jewelry store. All this happened within the space of a month in Bangalore.

But, on reflection, I am not surprised. The large Indian companies (whether it be Reliance, Tata Steel, Infosys/ Wipro or ICICI) have learnt to think and act scale – in fact, they seem to be following Jack Welch’s principles avidly – get into a business only if you want to/ and can, become a leader there. Look at what Reliance states on its Web-Site - “The retail initiative of Reliance will be without a parallel in size and spread and make India proud….Through multiple formats and a wide range of categories, Reliance is aiming to touch almost every Indian customer and supplier.”

It is however, unfortunate (maybe even inevitable) that this scale/ ramp up almost invariably is less than perfect – call it teething troubles/ call it inadequate planning – or maybe its just smart business – jump first/ over engineer the financing/ fill the gaps and misses only later – whether it is ICICI bank ATMs’ reported less-than-adequate back up; or the bugs in the RelianceOne Membership card as well as its pricing, apparently the secret to the success of the big companies’ scale plans is the fact that they (much like Microsoft) work on a ‘version’ philosophy – i.e., launch first, tweak later.

Meanwhile, there is no getting away from the fact, that only today’s news said that Mukesh Ambani is India’s “Billionaire of the Year”. Size, DOES matter, eh?