Walmart has been ranked as the top retail firm in India, after it acquired Flipkart in 2018 for $16 bn, according to Euromonitor study. “Many urban households are adopting more modern lifestyles, especially in big cities such as Bangalore, Mumbai, Pune, Delhi and Hyderabad,” the report, titled ‘Top 100 Retailers in Asia’, said. “This behavioural change is impacting retailing in the country. Due to households’ hectic lifestyles and the busy schedules of working adults, most consumers in urban areas prefer to make their monthly purchases from modern grocery retailers instead of traditional grocery retailers,” it said.
Walmart is followed by Amazon, The Future Group and Reliance Retail in the respective order in the list. The India list also includes One97 Communications that runs Paytm Mall and Avenue Supermarkets that operates DMart stores. The Walmart ranking at top of the India’s table is based solely on Flipkart and it does not take into account Walmart’s wholesale business in India as the study is only for business-to-consumer (B2C) retail businesses.
While Alibaba topped the overall ranking of 100 top retailers in Asia, India’s Future Group ranked at 78 and Reliance Retail at 86th on the Asia-wide ranking. Both store-based and non-store retailing in India continued to see strong current value growth in 2018.
Many retailers integrated multichannel retailing into their operations. They offer customers the possibility to make purchases via tablet or smartphone and to choose between home delivery, drive-in pick-up, pick-up at a railway station or retrieving purchases from the store itself or from a dedicated collection point. In contrast, pure play internet retailers expanded into the store-based channel by opening brick-and-mortar stores, the report added.
