KEY POINTS:
Mukesh Ambani has embarked on a spectacular shopping spree.
The chairman of the giant Reliance Industries is hoping to snatch the crown as India's retail king and, in the next five years, aims to spend US$6 billion ($9 billion) to do it.
He wants to sell Indians everything from vegetables and milk to televisions, bathroom fittings, books, luxury goods and much more.
These are ambitious goals even for Reliance, which is one of India's largest industrial houses with giant tentacles stretching into petrochemicals, petroleum and textiles. But nobody has ever accused Mukesh Ambani of thinking small.
This month, the giant mega-corporation opened 11 mini-supermarkets in Hyderabad in southern India. By the end of the month it hopes shoppers will be cruising down the aisles in 28 stores dotted around the city.
But this is a modest beginning and doesn't reveal the scale of Reliance's enormous dreams. In three months the company will, in swift succession, open its Reliance Fresh mini-supermarkets in Delhi, Bangalore and Madras.
Also in the next few months, it hopes the doors of its first hypermarket will be sliding open and that will be followed by its first consumer electronics store.
It's already paying rent for 700 sites that it hopes to turn into stores of one kind or another in the near future. In three years, it hopes to have almost 4000 Reliance Fresh stores around the country.
"We are going to ramp up very quickly. Whatever you think we can sell, we will sell," says a Reliance spokesman.
Ambani isn't the only Indian businessman who has signed up to Shopaholics Anonymous. Kishore Biyani is the tsar of the malls and bazaars and he's moving at lightning speed to make sure he isn't toppled from his throne. He already has about 200 stores - in almost every conceivable format from department stores to hypermarkets, supermarkets, discount shops and home product stores.
But Biyani knows it will be tough to stay the shopper's favourite so he's opening almost one store a day and he aims to have 3500 outlets by 2010.
"The aggression is there everywhere," says Biyani. "We want to capture consumer spending."
The battle for the Indian bazaar is under way.
Will the winner be the deep-pocketed Ambani, who can pour billions of dollars into the fight, or will it be Biyani, the man who started with a few shops and turned them into a giant pan-Indian empire?
Biyani may be the leader right now but he's a minnow compared to Mukesh Ambani, India's second richest man with a net worth of about US$18 billion, according to Forbes magazine, the bible of wealth calculation. Reliance owns Asia's largest oil refinery and it built India's largest mobile phone network. (The mobile phone business went to Mukesh's brother, Anil Ambani, after the two parted company this year).
To understand the craze for retailing, it is important to remember that India is one of the last countries in the world where mum-and-dad stores rule. Organised retailers control only a tiny corner of the malls and bazaars. Now, the big conglomerates are moving in and hoping to change all that at jaw-dropping speed.
But it's Ambani - closely followed by Biyani - who has drawn up the most ambitious plans of all. He wants to create a seamless chain that runs all the way from the "farm to the fork". And the company aims to be in 70 cities and several thousand smaller semi-urban areas in less than two years.
It says it aims to service 60 per cent of the population by 2011.
In fact, Reliance is hoping to outsell the competition by putting together a supply chain that nobody else will be able to match. It has already fanned out into the countryside and is putting up five agri-hubs in Punjab, the prosperous wheatbowl northern Indian state.
These hubs will collect produce from smaller centres that will be dotted around the state. Reliance is also putting together similar hubs in other states. The hubs will have warehouses and cold storage facilities and outlets where farmers can buy and sell products. Reliance will have cold-storage trucks and there is even talk of an air cargo service.
But can these blueprints really be turned into reality?
Reliance's hopes of reaching out to 60 per cent of India's 1 billion people by 2011 would require a retail revolution on a scale and speed that probably hasn't been seen anywhere in the world.
Even Biyani, who will be selling from 370,000 sq m by next June, plans to raise that to 740,000 sq m by 2010.
Look at it another way: both Reliance and Biyani's Future Group are planning to be Sam Walton, David Sainsbury, Simon Marks (Marks & Spencer) and Harry Gordon Selfridge all rolled into one and a bit more. Will this mean the death of the pushcart vendors and the family stores that have been the backbone of India's retail trade? Certainly, they'll have a hard time keeping up as India's retail landscape is transformed beyond recognition.
