Shoppers Stop managing director and chief executive officer Venu Nair is upbeat about the festival season as the retailer is seeing higher footfall than the pre-Covid time.
In an interview to CNBC-TV18 on September 7, Nair said while inflation was still there, as Shoppers Stop operated in the premium segment, the impact was lower. Edited excerpts:
How have the early trends of the festive season been shaping up and how are they impacting the company’s sales and the growth outlook?
Now the festive season having started and as we all know it starts from the east, it is a very strong feeling, which gives an indication of what to expect and I think there are a couple of factors which are playing in.
As we all know after two years this is the first full festive period that people will experience without the fear of Covid and that's obviously driving people into the shops for shopping and indulging.
There are parties and there are events that are happening, all of which had been in the pause mode for two years. So I think that's definitely the one big factor that is driving the trends in growth outlook and sales.
Is inflation still a cause of concern or do you think the festive season will see people coming out and buy despite inflation and currently what's the kind of impact that you're seeing because of inflation? Are you seeing that people are cutting back on their expenses and shopping lesser?
Inflation is there and I think we can all see that and that's definitely a factor… As Shoppers Stop, operates in the premium segment of the market and there I think the impact is slightly lesser and because of inflation, people are prioritising in times like these—they prioritise on quality, they prioritise on brands and they prioritise on shopping with retailers like ourselves who they trust.
I think that's what helps us because when times like these come when the value of money is felt even more.
Talking about the footfalls, are they well beyond or ahead of pre-Covid levels? And also with respect to billing for customers, are the bill values also at pre-Covid levels? Can you give us a sense of that in terms of footfalls?
Footfalls are certainly ahead of pre-Covid numbers, I mean the level is now on a like-for-like basis with the pre-Covid numbers.
If I remember right, they were up eight percent in the first quarter and that's the kind of trend that we have been seeing now. I think that's the trend which we are continuing to see, this was for quarter one and a similar trend now in terms of the absolute spins and I think this is an area where we've definitely seen a big upsurge we've now had eight quarters of continuous like-for-like growth in the average bill values.
So over the previous quarter of the same period for eight quarters now we've had growing bill values and that's telling us two things—one, that the customer is loving what they see and second, because of the fact that they love what they see, they're putting more items into the basket and that's certainly something which we are benefiting from.
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