Kishore Biyani plans to make Future Group a trillion dollars firm in 30 years

Kishore Biyani owner of retail behemoth Future Group, one of the largest brick and mortar retail companies in India, said that Future Group is ushering in Retail 3.0 and it will be a trillion dollars company by 2047.

“I saw a SoftBank presentation, where they had a 50-year plan, IKEA has a 100-year plan, so I thought we could have a 30-year plan,” said Kishore Biyani.

The company plans to open Easyday small-store within 2 km of every Indian consumer by 2022. There will be around 10,000 stores in five years, with the first coming in next 30 days. Each EasyDay Club store will be for registered members only, with each store accepting only 2,000 members.

As per estimation, for each store will be an investment of Rs 15 lakh and they will be spread across 3,500-4,000 sq ft and offer 3,500 items of dairy need and essentials.

The stores will also be a marketplace giving consumers access to the company’s entire inventory through a digital medium.

At present, Future Group is the parent of four listed retail entities Future Retail Ltd, Future Lifestyle Fashion Ltd and Future Consumer Ltd and Future Enterprises Ltd, which together have a combined revenue of $4.4 billion.

Kishore Biyani's EasyDay store club

It is a select club, which allows entry to just 2,000 customers. Pay Rs 999 for a year and shop exclusively at this store.

The company plans to set up 1,100 stores by March and then grow beyond. These members get a 10% discount on the total bill and first access to certain products.

Biyani expects 50% of the members which is 10 million people, to have an average spend of Rs 1 lakh per annum translating into revenues of Rs 1 trillion. The group anticipates growing at a 20% compound annual growth rate for the next 30 years. Indian economy will be $85 trillion by 2050.

Future Group has tied up with technology companies Google. Facebook and consulting firm Deloitte for the roll out of its Retail 3.0 initiative.

The Group has also partnered with seven startups in the area of chatbox, machine learning, and voice recognition out of its Consumer and Data Lab in Bengaluru. It is also building a data lake, a data repository on which it will build its Artificial Intelligence in Bangalore and Kolkata.

The company is looking at rolling out a voice assistant Saral, and an app.

Earlier, in August 2016, Big Bazaar suspended operations in a few cities. Biyani acknowledged that he lost Rs 300 crore on it. Later he bought FabFurnish for around Rs 20 crore from Germany-based Rocket Internet in April 2016.

Biyani said in an interview that FabFurnish was teaching him how to not run an e-commerce business. Biyani also said he will not invest in the online space for two years.

Lashing out on e-commerce companies, Biyani said that in India hardly contribute to less than 0.2 per cent of total retail sales and will never be able to turn profitable.

This is Kishore Biyani’s third attempt at online retail. The first two, Big Bazaar Direct and FabFurnish, did not take off as expected. According to Biyani Retail 1.0 stood for the brick and mortar retail store. Retail 2.0 stood for e-commerce companies which he also suggested is the business of Flipkart and Amazon.