Wherever you go, the ‘tele-shoppe’ will follow

IIPM MANAGEMENT INSTITUTE

Latest health booster strategy for handset majors? It’s all about walking happily-ever-after into the retail sunset

Next time when you go shopping for a mobile phone, make sure that you are not blown away by the ambience of the new jazzed up mobile store which has sprung up recently in your neighbourhood. From the insipid & fusty retailer (your previous mobile buying destination) to this nubile & trendy mobile store, your shopping experience would never be the same again. Be it Motorola, Nokia or the Essar group, all are investing heavily in this new phenomenon of specialty stores for mobile retail. Although some telecom companies already have their unique retail presence via Nokia Care Centers & Reliance Web World outlets, the telecom sector is now readying itself to take the next big leap for serving customers through these specialty stores.

Leading the fray is Essar group, which has initiated the concept of ‘one stop mobile solution shop’ in partnership with the Richard Branson’s Virgin Group. “Essar is a key player in the ever burgeoning retail markets in India. Virgin, on the other hand, is one of the most respected service brands in the world. Together we will gain in strength and bring to the customer a new and world-class experience at The Mobile Store through this partnership,” says Ravi Ruia. The Essar- Virgin stores will provide customers with a range of handsets and mobile accessories, apart from peddling a variety of entertainment products like gaming devices, DTH, MP3 players, cameras, while also offering services like handset repairs & exchange and bill collections.

Seeing competition hot on heels, India’s largest handset manufacturer, Nokia, is also revving up the focus on its ‘Nokia Care’ concept. The company has unveiled its Global Concept Stores in select locations across India over the last one month. Nokia also plans to create a special experiential zone for its N-Series in these outlets. While others are simply calling their retail expansion a business strategy, Nokia justifies its plans on the basis of a segmentation study, which divides the consumers in four different groups: Live, connect, achieve and explore. Nokia concept stores plan to have separate demo and experience zones for each kind of the consumer categorisation, thus enriching the consumer experience!

Joining this telecom retail mania is Motorola, which opened its first ‘Motorola Branded Store’ in New Delhi on April 18. “The Moto Store is testimony to the evolving Indian consumer, who has an increasingly sophisticated appetite for the latest, cutting edge mobile technology,” adds Malcolm Dawe, VP, Motorola India Mobile Devices. Motorola stores are an important step in company’s global strategy to offer its customers a truly seamless experience across its entire product portfolio. The ultimate game plan: Provide consumers with a great ambience, snazzy technological display, leverage the aspirational impact and make sure that he ends up spending more than he had originally intended to!

Edit Bureau: Devdeep Singh

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Source : IIPM Editorial, 2007

An IIPM and Professor Arindam Chaudhuri (Renowned Management Guru and Economist) Initiative

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Hyundai slows down

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Hyundai Motor Co. is not exactly having the time of its life. For the fifth quarter in the running, the South Korean carmaker’s – and the world’s sixth-largest automaker – net profit as well as sales have taken a beating. Recently, the company announced that for the first quarter of this year (that ended March 31), its net profit fell 10.2% to 307.4 billion won; a year earlier, the figure had stood at 342.39 billion. Sales-wise, Hyundai saw a decline of 2.6% in the last quarter. This is not what analysts expected: They had predicted that the company would post a net profit that would be much, much higher. So what happened along the way? Well, for one, there’s the case of the stronger currency. A stronger currency (in this case, the won) is making Hyundai vehicles much more expensive overseas, therefore reducing the value of profits earned. This is put into context when one sees that, in 2006, exports constituted for almost 60% of Hyundai’s sales. Also, Hyundai has been facing a problem on its labour front, and strikes are a very common feature at the company. Last year, for instance, as many as four striking labour walkouts had cost Hyundai a whopping 1.64 trillion won in lost output. Then, there’s also the intense competition in the Chinese market, which is forcing the auto-makers to reduce prices there. All in all, Hyundai seems to have run into a roadblock.

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Source : IIPM Editorial, 2007

An IIPM and Professor Arindam Chaudhuri (Renowned Management Guru and Economist) Initiative

Honey, Come Let’s Go To The Space!

Professor Arindam Chaudhuri (Renowned Management Guru and Economist) Initiative

Looking for a holiday? Then forget the Alps and buckle your seat belts to a journey in the outer space. And, interestingly, you need not be an astronaut to go there, just being loaded with moolah is suffice. Space tourism is the new tourist destination with few people already making full use of the opportunity. A suborbital flight, fit to carry 5-8 passengers, will take you into space and would cost according to the distance covered. An out-of-the-world experience, this journey is for the rich and famous. And leading this space tourism journey is Sir Richard Branson’s Virgin Galactic, trying to bring excitement of outer space voyage to the civilians at just $200,000.

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Source : IIPM Editorial, 2007

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Lightstone strikes a lightening deal!

IIPM MANAGEMENT INSTITUTE

Lightstone Group has made their first hotelbuy a big deal. In one of the American history’s biggest hotel deals, Lightstone, country’s largest real-estate firm, will buy Extended Stay Hotels from the Blackstone private equity group for $8 billion. Lightstone will finance the deal with $1 billion in cash and $7 billion in debt. It won the deal over competing bids from Fortress Investment and Goldman Sachs. Extended Stay Hotels – the biggest player in the American mid priced extended stay segment – owns 683 properties with 76,000 rooms in the US and in Canada. Apart from its namesake, it operates under four other brand-names: Extended Stay America, Homestead Studio Suites, Studio- Plus and Cross land.

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Source : IIPM Editorial, 2007

An IIPM and Professor Arindam Chaudhuri (Renowned Management Guru and Economist) Initiative

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