Subhiksha not paying some bills

Subhiksha in Sanskrit means “the giver of all good things in life”. Just don’t tell that to some vendors in the Capital’s largest wholesale market for fruit and vegetables, who allege that the no-frills discount retailer, Subhiksha Trading Services Ltd, hasn’t paid them their dues for the past several months.
As a result, many wholesale suppliers in Azadpur mandi, or market, say they have stopped supplying to various Subhiksha outlets in the National Capital Region (NCR) as Delhi and its environs are collectively called, after their payments were held up for anything between two and six months. As a rule, bulk buyers pay up suppliers within a month.

A senior office bearer of Vegetable Traders Association of Azadpur put the amount due to suppliers at around Rs2 crore. He didn’t wish to be identified. At least half a dozen other fruit and vegetable sellers in the mandi, however, said it could be as high as Rs3 crore.
A trader, who did not wish to be named, said: “I will stop supplying to Subhiksha the day I recover my dues.” He claimed his outstanding against the firm was more than Rs30 lakh. “If I stop supplying to them, they may withhold my previous dues.”
A Subhiksha official, however, downplayed the issue.
“If you are doing business and someone’s payment is delayed, it could be for several reasons. It could be because of supply issues, quality issues, or billing issues,” said Ashu Phakey, president (Delhi region) at Subhiksha. He said he was unaware of the payment-related problem at Azadpur even as wholesalers maintained they called on him at his office as well as spoke to him on phone. “Since they are not organized kind of vendors, they, at times, have problem in being able to reconcile their accounts because they don’t operate with all the invoices…so some guys may have problems.”
R. Subramanian, managing director of Subhiksha, said he was also unaware of such a problem at Azadpur. “We work in a completely decentralized system...we do not really handle payments to vendors centrally at all,” he said. However, he admitted that there are some “reconciliation issues” and said Subhiksha’s “team in Delhi was going through a large-scale reconciliation of accounts in Azadpur market”.
Mint couldn’t immediately ascertain whether alleged payment delays were restricted to NCR, or were broader.
But in NCR, many vendors, who have not been paid their dues, say they have stopped their supplies to the retailer.
Sujeet Kumar of Sujeet Ajeet and Co. said he stopped supplying to the retailer two months ago after unpaid dues amounted to around Rs25 lakh.

R. Subramanian, managing director of Subhiksha, claims that the retail firm is on an extremely high growth path

Discount retailer Subhiksha Trading Services Ltd has been in the news lately. In early September, there were allegations that the firm was not paying its suppliers (Mint, 5 September), and reports that the firm had sold a 10% stake to billionaire Azim Premji for Rs230 crore. Then, the company said that after its merger with Blue Green Constructions and the subsequent renaming of the firm as Subhiksha India, the merged entity would seek a listing (Blue Green is already listed on the exchanges).
Last week, employees at some Subhiksha stores in New Delhi and its environs told Mint that the retailer had not paid them salaries for August.
R. Subramanian, managing director of Subhiksha, spoke to Mint over the telephone on Wednesday to specifically counter the allegations regarding salaries and also commented on the general perception that his firm is facing a cash crunch. Edited excerpts:
Some employees say they haven’t been paid August salaries. What has caused the delay?
There is no delay at all. I don’t know who you spoke to (and) whether they are our employees. I have no clue.
Let me be very clear: As an organization, we have 5,500 or so (employees) across the country and every single employee has been paid whatever salary is due and payable for the month of August in the month of September. There is not a single employee that has not been paid by us.
Is your company going through a financial crisis?
I think that was the theme of the last story you wrote and this story that you are trying to write now. I think we clarified the same thing last time as well.
The reality is that we are on an extremely high growth path. We are doubling turnover from last year to this year and we are also sort of investing in new projects and are sort of well on our way to setting up 2 million sq. ft of space by June of next year. Basically, the point is, we are expanding.

So, obviously, we don’t have any financial crunch and if we are having a financial crunch then we won’t be allocating funds for the expansion. We are in the middle of the year and we have already completed a reasonable 40% of the expansion planned for the year and we are reasonably hopeful that the balance 60% of the expansion plans will be completed. So, whatever targets we set out for ourselves we are moving on that.
When a company is going through a rapid expansion...a company in any business will allocate its money. I am saying... as a newspaper you will decide you will pay your newsprint vendor 15 days late or...pay printing and vendors 10 days late. Those sort of things happen in a bad market when vendors desperately need money—every retailer will find ways to squeeze the various suppliers and sort of vendors for best possible deals whether it’s discounts or whether it’s in terms of trade margin or whether it is in terms of credit. I am saying we are not sort of (Mahatma) Gandhi and (Gautama) Buddha to say that we are sort of completely not enchanted by the profit from whoever we deal with.
We are tempted to get better deals from whoever we deal with and, therefore, we would push to get the best deal we can and we do it. The fact is that we pushed for the best deal does not mean we are facing a financial crisis. We are exploiting the weak market for getting the best deals for us.
If you visit any Subhiksha store in Delhi or the National Capital Region, many of them are partially empty—with empty racks. Any reason for this?
We constantly sort of look at our merchandising strategy and inventory turnover strategy. Our inventory is in line with what sales we want to achieve and whether stores will be larger or the stores might have more racks, we might be following a particular strategy in terms of what we want to do. Fundamentally, the key piece, as far as we are concerned, is we have sales target for the stores. Our stores will achieve 90% to 100% of our sales target. The inventory is in line with the sales target we look for. Just because we have racks doesn’t mean that we have to fill the racks and I don’t think that is a strategy a retailer would want to work on.
Of course, we can fill the racks if that will give an impression that we are not in a financial crunch. But that’s not the basis on which we operate. We operate our business on the basis of what stocks are required to sell, what we want to sell... We supply our stores every day and need only so much inventory to be able to manage whatever sales we want to manage.

Reliance Retail close to break-even

Reliance Retail Ltd, which runs at least 590 stores across 57 cities in India, has already managed to achieve a near break-even by posting a loss of less than Rs1 crore in its first full year of operations, just 17 months after opening its first store.

Closely held Reliance Retail posted a net loss of Rs0.82 crore on sales of Rs1,486 crore for the fiscal ended 31 March.

The results appear to underscore why Reliance Retail, owned by India’s largest private company by sales, Reliance Industries Ltd, has eagerly embraced an early mover strategy despite bearing the brunt of protests, including vandalism, from small shopkeepers and wholesalers in some of the 13 states where it operates its stores in.

The results for Reliance Retail, which is normally reticent about discussing its financial profile given the continuing backlash against organized retail in India, are tucked away on Page 149 of the 2007-08 annual shareholder report from Reliance Industries, which is controlled by Mukesh Ambani.

Organized retailers such as Reliance Retail were not expected to show a profit in their first several years of operations, partly because of high capital expenditure involved in setting up a chain of stores, especially with spiralling real estate costs of the past two years in India that have led to a doubling of lease rentals in some cities.

Reliance Retail’s first-year results, while not necessarily an automatic indicator of how the still-rapidly expanding business will perform in year two, are nonetheless impressive given the state of profit margins in the retail business, where most Indian companies are still learning and experimenting with branded stores.

Indeed, even for Chennai-based Subhiksha, which opened its first store in 1997 and claims to be India’s largest supermarket brand, net profit margins are only around 2%, said R. Subramanian, founder and managing director of Subhiksha Trading Services Ltd, in an earlier interview with Mint.

But, that hasn’t stopped large industrial groups such as Reliance, Kolkata-based RPG Group and diversified conglomerate Aditya Birla Group, from entering the organized retail market. On deck is a similar venture from the Bharti family, promoters of India’s largest mobile phone company. Part of that stems from the desire to grab customers’ wallets and minds before what is seen as the inevitable saturation of India with branded stores. The Indian retail market is estimated at Rs14.1 trillion and the share of organized retail was around 4% or Rs51,100 crore in 2006, according to India Retail Report 2007 prepared by Technopak Advisors, a management consulting firm.

But, the land rush also stems from large industrial houses such as Reliance having deep pockets and the ability to sustain substantial investments.

Indeed, Reliance Retail’s reported revenues are just around 1% of Reliance Industries’ total sales of Rs1.39 trillion for the fiscal 2008.

Reliance Retail already has 3.5 million sq. ft of trading space and has outlined a total investment of Rs25,000 crore over the next few years, even though protests from small retailers and wholesalers have slowed some of its expansion plans. So far, Reliance Industries has invested nearly Rs4,400 crore in Reliance Retail in the form of equity and preference shares. The equity investment amounts to Rs3,785 crore, giving Reliance Industries a 98.74% stake in the retail venture, according to the annual report.

Not all the performance is rosy. Other retail subsidiaries of Reliance Industries such as Reliance Fresh Ltd (formerly known as Ranger Farms Ltd) and Reliance Dairy Foods Ltd have reported losses for the year ended March. Reliance Fresh has a loss of Rs20 crore on a revenue of Rs357 crore, while Reliance Dairy Foods incurred a loss of Rs3 crore on revenues of Rs66 crore.

The interlinkages between Reliance Retail results and these losses were unclear. Reliance Retail operates under 12 different store formats ranging from convenience store concept to consumer durables concept and automotive speciality formats. It has also entered into two joint ventures —Pearle Europe for optical retailing and Marks and Spencer for apparel retailing.