Share of organised retail expected to rise to 18-20% by 2011

New Delhi, Feb 21 (UNI) Driven by changing lifestyles, strong income growth and favourable demographic patterns, the organised retail in the country, which forms only three per cent of the 330 billion dollar industry, is expected to rise to 18-20 per cent by 2011.

According to a survey, the industry is expected to attract 30 billion dollars investments in the coming few years, which will also supplement the change.

The size of the industry was estimated at 330 billion dollars in 2006 and is expected to grow at six per cent per annum. The share of the organised retail of the amount at present stands at a mere three per cent, roughly 12 billion dollars.

''It (retail) is highly fragmented with around 12-14 million retailers, resulting in highest density of retail outlets, with one outlet per 100 people,'' Sun Microsystems General Manager (Retail Practice) Priyadarshi Mohapatra told reporters here.

However, the organised trade is expected to touch around 90-100 billion dollars by 2011, he added.

India is currently the ninth largest retail market in the world, and it is names of small towns like Dehradun, Vijayawada, Lucknow and Nashik that will power the country up the ranking soon, Mr Mohapatra said.

The company in association with Technopak Advisors Ltd today launched a study on IT requirements for retail companies and Sun's solutions for the retail industry.

The white paper, 'Quality information - a necessary asset for retail', takes a closer look at the impacts of dispersed customer information as well as the potential benefits of implementing a single customer view.

It presents Sun's approach to achieving a single customer view - building composite applications on a service-oriented architecture (SOA) - an aproach that overcomes the complexity and limitations of previous tactis.

The study said that can target their marketing campaigns more precisely based on the customer's unique spending activities, improve the seed and personalisation, and process-centric composite applications.

Sun offers a combination of products and services to help comapnies achieve asingle customer view by deploying an SOA platform and building composite applications.

Some of the company's retail clients include Reliance, Apollo Firm, Wal-Mart, Amazon.com, eBay, Giorgio Armani and Sainsbury's.

Technopak Advisors services offers inegrated strategy, process and technology deployment solutions to its clients. It has offices in Gurgaon, Bangalore, Mumbai and Hyderabad.

UNI