The recent news of Benetton opening some of its stores across the country gave a ray of hope to the retail industry after a long halt, However, it looks like resuming operations does not solve all the problems for the international retailer.<\/p>\n
The brands recently announced that it is expecting a revenue slump as low as 45%<\/strong> this year as the pandemic continues to spread its fear. It believes that the company might go back by a year<\/strong> owing to the disruptive health crisis.<\/p>\n \u201cFrom the point of impact, yes, it is a big one and from our business perspective we feel that we are a year behind now in our brand journey,\u201d Sundeep Chugh, Managing Director, and CEO, Benetton India told PTI.<\/p>\n Elaborating further, he said, \u201cWhat we are supposed to deliver in this year\u2019s budget (January-December), if everything goes well and there is no COVID-19 phase II, we anticipate that it can only be delivered next year. To sum it up, almost a year behind<\/strong> in our brand journey in India.\u201d<\/p>\n When everyone is predicting that this situation might turn people towards the online modes due to its convenient nature, the company still believes that the fashion of offline retailing is evergreen. Despite the company\u2019s online sales gaining traction by 10-15%, it says that their offline sales will remain dominant. Commenting further on the revenue condition, the MD says he expects a 35-45 percent impact, similar to other fashion retailers in the country.<\/p>\n Furthermore, the company takes pride<\/strong> in standing beside their staff in a time where the news of furloughing and retrenchments is all over the place. Benetton, instead, has been taking this time to upskill<\/strong> its employees and get them acquainted with new technological methods prevalent today.<\/p>\n \u201cOur first priority was protecting and investing in our people. Our brand is all about the team, which is behind the brand\u2026We realize that we are in a very difficult situation\u2026(but) we keep investing in our people. Whatever brand we are today, we are all because of our team,\u201d he said.<\/p>\n He added, \u201cEven if we lost two months of turnover, the team when they are back, with an incremental contribution every day over the next 12-15 months, when they look back this (difficulties) should be a thing of the past\u2026\u201d<\/p>\n The company is also focusing on coming up with new ways of communication<\/strong> and presentation<\/strong> to make customers comfortable with the new normal of today. Chugh believes that this pandemic is definitely going to define the customer\u2019s buying patterns.<\/p>\n Commenting on the revival of the industry, he shared, \u201cBut I feel that change in behavior will not be very significant,\u201d he said adding in China which is now settling down, there is a 10-15 percent better throughput in online as compared to offline, similar to what Hong Kong witnessed during SARS.\u201d<\/p>\n \u201cSo the better traction or throughput of online will continue for 4-6 months and certain people would also try to adapt to that habit\u2026it would see an initial advantage for the next four to six months. There would be a balance tilting towards online,\u201d he added.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" The company in its first phase of reopening has resumed operations in 15 out of the 350 stores in the<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":10,"featured_media":2647,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":[],"categories":[3,1006],"tags":[],"yst_prominent_words":[4428,4314,107,4427,185,389,3852,466,4426,1322,612,95,4315,2806,147,4422,3768,4429,614,703],"amp_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/indiacityblog.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2646"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/indiacityblog.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/indiacityblog.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/indiacityblog.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/10"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/indiacityblog.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=2646"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/indiacityblog.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2646\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/indiacityblog.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/2647"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/indiacityblog.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=2646"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/indiacityblog.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=2646"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/indiacityblog.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=2646"},{"taxonomy":"yst_prominent_words","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/indiacityblog.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/yst_prominent_words?post=2646"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}