Wal-Mart Waits With Carrefour as India Wins Instant Gain: Retail. Wal-Mart Stores Inc. (WMT) and Carrefour SA (CA) waited seven years for access to India’s $400 billion retail market. They may have to wait almost as long to make a profit in the world’s second most populous nation. Expensive real estate, a warehouse shortage and congested roads will force foreign retailers to spend about 20 billion rupees ($382 million) on supply systems, said Anand Ramanathan, associate director at KPMG Advisory Services in India. India on Nov. 24 said it will allow overseas companies to invest up to 51 percent in retail stores selling more than one brand. The decision, which ends at least seven years of debate, may benefit local merchants, such as Pantaloon Retail India Ltd.
“It will take at least two to three to five years before we see the full impact of this change in policy,” said Saloni Nangia, senior vice president at Technopak Advisors Pvt. Head Start Shares of India’s three biggest retailers jumped in Mumbai trading on news about the changes. Bharti Venture. How Walmart Is Changing China - Magazine. The world’s biggest corporation and the world’s most populous nation have launched a bold experiment in consumer behavior and environmental stewardship: to set green standards for 20,000 suppliers making several hundred thousand items sold to billions of shoppers worldwide.
Will that effort take hold, or will it unravel in a recriminatory tangle of misguided expectations and broken promises? Susan Meiselas/Magnum Photos Beside the Fifth Ring Road, one of the superhighways encircling Beijing like concentric shock waves radiating outward from the epicenter of an earthquake, sits an enormous big-box installation, one of thousands now proliferating throughout China. The parking lots flanking it are gridlocked with late-model cars and ruddy-faced peasants-turned-workers pushing long, snake-like trains of shopping carts toward the entrance. Also see: A Map of Walmart in China From sea cucumbers in Dalian to upscale Sam's Clubs in Shanghai, Walmart stores vary from province to province. The Wager. Bloomberg.
Vietnam’s rule requiring foreign retail chain operators such as Tesco Plc (TSCO) to meet an economic needs test for starting more than one store in the nation is “discrimination,” a trade group said. The test “appears to be a market access barrier to foreign invested enterprises to expand,” the European Chamber of Commerce in Vietnam said in a report released yesterday. That regulation needs to be changed to lure more overseas investment in the sector, according to the group.
Vietnam’s 25-year-old goal of attracting foreign investors to set up manufacturing hubs in the country has been dented by labor disputes that have hurt the nation’s appeal as a low-cost alternative to China. Pledged foreign direct investment in Vietnam is forecast to drop to $15 billion in 2012 from an estimated $17 billion this year, the government said in October.
Greg Sage, a spokesman for Cheshunt, England-based Tesco, declined to comment. The U.K.’s largest supermarket chain doesn’t have a store in Vietnam. Component Information.