The Big Gainers

While American biggies amazon and Walmart fight for their pound of flesh in India, Indian retailers have quietly stolen the show.

- Ajita Shashidhar

YEAR 2018 HAS BEEN quite momentous for the Indian modern retail story. While homegrown retailer DMart surprised the market with its high valuations, Kishore Biyani-owned Future Group invested in building scale, and Reliance Retail strove hard to build its omni-channel presence. It was also during this time that American retail giant Walmart Inc. announced that it was going to buy Indian ecommerce company Flipkart for an astronomical $16 billion (about 1.17 lakh crore at 73.19 to a dollar). The action at once triggered, what many call, battle of the Americans in India. There was scepticism galore whether the presence of the two global biggies – Walmart and Amazon.com – could actually wipe out Indian retailers. Apart from Reliance Retail none of the other Indian retail companies had the money power to fight them out. The biggest fear of Indian retailers was that the American biggies would deep discount and take away their customers, while they didn’t have the wherewithal to burn cash on similar strategies.

It’s been close to six months since Walmart announced it was going to buy out Flipkart, and the surprising bit is that the market cap of the Indian retail companies has soared by 57 per cent. The biggest gainer has been V-Mart Retail, whose average market cap grew by 127.8 per cent (1,601 crore to 3,648 crore for the October 2017-September 2018 period), Future Retail saw a 96.81 per cent jump (from 13,826 crore to 27,211 crore), while Shoppers Stop’s average market cap grew by 68.20 per cent (from 2,840 crore to 4,778 crore). Value retailer Dmart (owned by Avenue Supermarts), whose market cap growth was the talk of the market all through 2017, also saw a 59.15 per cent growth in market cap.