Reliance Retail expects to become the world’s biggest garment seller by volume in the next two years, driven by growing demand in the most populous market that is not showing any signs of a slowdown, a top executive said.
Customer spending is purely based on sentiment and India’s growth story is intact because of a feel-good factor in the market, Reliance’s fashion and lifestyle chief executive Akhilesh Prasad told ET. “India will be the fastest growing economy and there is no problem. So, we are managing customer sentiment which ensures the market grows.”
With more than 4,000 fashion and apparel stores, including brands such as Trends, Centro, Azorte and Fashion Factory, Reliance is by far the market leader in the segment. The retailer sold 430 million pieces of garment in 2022, enough to clothe the entire population of the US and Canada.
Reliance chairman Mukesh Ambani believes that the one who doesn’t grow actually shrinks, Prasad said. “And that’s the brief from our leadership,” he said. “We sell the largest number of garments in the country and in a year or two, we should be the highest in the world. We have 1.4 billion people (in India), so the market is already here.”
Reliance Retail has grown at 17% on a compounded annual rate over the last decade with consumer electronics expanding the fastest. However, in the past five years, growth has been majorly driven by fashion and lifestyle which expanded 43%, followed by grocery that grew 41%. Fashion contributes the highest to overall profitability with the widest margins at 24%.
Although the figures of wealth and income disparities are already staggering in wealthier Western countries, they are significantly worse in countries like India and China. One instance that clearly depicts the disparity is the fact that an average Indian would need to work 17 million years to become as wealthy as Mukesh Ambani.
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