Aditya Birla Fashion and Retail Ltd (ABFRL) is the India’s First Fashon Retailer Which Crossed $1 billion revenue. As on 2023, Aditya Birla Fashion and Retail has around $1.5 billion (Rs 12,500 crores) annual revenue. It is the owner of popular fashion and retail outlets known as Pantaloons, Madura Fashion, and Lifestyle stores. This specific case study describes Aditya Birla Fashion and Retail Growth Story and its Unique Brand Building Strategy.
Possessing Capacity: As on 2023, ABFRL has 3,977 branded outlets; and present in 33,535 multi-brand outlets, and 6,723 Point of Sales in Different Stores Across India. ABFRL’s brand capacity includes leading brands such as Louis Phillippe, Van Heusen, Allen Solly, and Peter England. These brands are proved brands in global markets for more than 25 years.
What Helped the Growth?: As on 2023, ABFRL’s Series of Acquisitions such as TCNS Clothing, Sabyasachi, Jaypore, Forever 21, and Masaba helped the growth story. And also Innovating the Design and Identifying Right Brands to Take Together help the business acceleration. As on May 2023, ABFRL spent Rs 1650 crores to purchase promotors stake and merge with TCNS clothing company. As part of this acquisition, ABFRL will be acquiring brands such as Aurehia, Wishful, Folksong and Eleven. ABFRL is Expecting Multi-decadal consumption growth in the country. With these acquisitions, ABFRL’s ethnic wear portfolio is about to reach to Rs 5.000 crores in next 3 years. TCNS designs, manufactures, markets, and retails women ware. Along with TCNS merger, ABFRL will expand its market region into Sri Lanka, Nepal, and Mauritius Kind of Countries.
Unique Brand Building Strategy: ABFRL partnered with Ethnic wear designers such as “Sabyasachi”, “Shantanu & Nikhil”, “Tarun Tahiliani”, and “House of Masaba”. To Build the Brand Digitally, with its “House of D2C Brands”, built a portfolio of digital brands on its venture TMRW. Additionally, towards strong Brand Building, to complement with its indigenously developed brands, it partnered with International brands such as Ted Baker, Fred Perry, Forever 21, Reebok and Ralph Lauren.
ABFRL in association with Deutsche Gesellschaft Fur Internationale Zusammenarbeit (GIZ) announced “Circularity Innovation Challenge-2023” to encourage Youth to participate in co-designing innovative projects with ABFRL using textile waste and recycle practices; these innovation challenge winners get opportunity of funding, industry showcasing, and large-scale stakeholder interaction. This kind of initiatives help ABFRL to come up with innovative brands which are more consumer friendly and technically superior.
Focus Areas: As on 2023, Aditya Birla Fashion and Retail needs to stabilize the businesses it acquired, consolidate the inventory, get rid of stocks, operationalize the acquired outlets, and market them with full-fledged capabilities. Keeping rising expenditure in mind, ABFRL’s focus needs to be on making these outlets profit-oriented and contributing to its portfolio.
Portfolio Organization: In order for Operational and Functional feasibility, ABFRL categorized these businesses into 6 different categories such as Lifestyle, Pantaloons, Athleisure, Youth Fashion, Super Premium, and Ethnic Wear.
Challenges in Business: Following are challenges ABFRL facing:
- In FY2023, it encountered Challenges related to growing expenses surpassing demand in market, Particularly in Apparel and Lifestyle products.
- The increasing investments to grow the number of outlets, balancing between demand and expenditure, prioritizing between offline sales and online investments (ecommerce business) would be the focus points to concentrate for ABFRL.
- Another challenge is Consumption becoming discretionary, because of the shift from unbranded goods to branded goods in the market.
- Another challenge is the competition from other industry players such as Shopper’s Stop and Tata’s Trent outlets.
As the Indian retail industry is heading towards $1 trillion opportunity, and foreign players entering into India such as Marks & Spencer, Zara, H&M, GAP; the ones who understand the dynamics of Indian retail markets, local conditions, complexities, FDI (Foreign Direct Investment) regulations, workforce conditions, ecommerce aspects, will be sustaining and growing their businesses.
Also, the Indian retail sector being the very ancient sector, is the house for famous established players like Arvind Mills, Raymonds, Reliance Trends, Big Bazar, and Ecommerce players such as Flipkart and Snapdeal. All these players will be going behind this $1 trillion retail opportunity. Retail is the major sector contributing to Indian Economy.
Hope this is useful.
Best Regards,
Dr.Goparaju Purna Sudhakar
References:
- BL (2023), “Aditya Birla Fashion to Acquire 51% stake in TCNS Clothing for Rs 1650 crore”, The Hindu Business Line, May 06, 2023.
- Pinto, V.S. (2023), “Cautious Optimism dictates Aditya Birla Fashion’s Strategy for FY24”, The Financial Express, May 25, 2023.
- IndiaRetailing (2023), “Aditya Birla Fashion and Retail (ABFRL) announces ‘Circular Innovation Challenge-2023’”, IndianRetailing.com, April 20, 2023.
- Singh, P. (2016), “India: Despite Challenges, The Retail Market Offers Vast Potential”, fashionunited.uk, 2023.
- Live Mint (2023), “Adita Birla Fashion Q4: Net Loss at Rs 187 crore, revenue up 26%”, Live Mint, May 22, 2023.
- “List of Aditya Birla Fashion Companies”, www.crunchbase.com, 2023.
- “Aditya Birla Fashion and Retail Limited (ABFRL)”, www.adityabirla.com
- www.abfrl.com