Master class from Neville Noronha of Dmart

Reading transcripts of Neville Noronhna is a master class in understanding retail market dynamics, D-Mart’s company culture and insight into building a fantastic business

Here are some gems, my notes in red

On Opportunity size 

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Market size is very large. In fact, why do we have to worry? My message even to my competitor is the same thing, “Why worry about each other?” The Pie is big and the pie itself is growing so much. So, there is nothing to worry about competition. If there is anything to worry about, it is about us. We should not get complacent; we should be constantly excited because this business is very tough and very boring. So, how you maintain the excitement and the focus in the business is the key.
Long-term orientation
if we want to open more than 20 stores, only ownership will not work but at the same time nine years lease is a very short period for us. So, we are seeing long-term lease. Also, we are working hard on ensuring that our real estate teams are well bolstered and today we have a much larger team, we are working on a lot of deals. But point taken, however, I will say that we are moving from extreme conservatism to controlled aggression.
Know your customer & more importantly know yourself
I will give you more qualitative response. What we can tell you is that consumers who really know D-Mart and shop in D-Mart, they are relatively less demanding than a typical E-Commerce shopper. An E-Commerce shopper is very different from a typical D-Mart shopper. The E-Commerce shopper expects an extremely high level of service including monetary benefits for any lapse in service. We are struggling with that to be very honest. It is a challenge if a person is not familiar with DMart. That is very clearly coming out. That is why this is all still an experiment. Should we invest more in improving the experience but then that is against the grain of what we are – which is a very functional service, we do not want to do what others are trying to do.
Growth sustainability 
But the average value we are investing in a property is going up. Second reason is, we are building relatively larger stores because we see headroom for a 10 year CAGR growth. And we believe that for the same effort, it is better to have one store relatively larger rather than thinking of opening another store in the same area.
Turning back is not easy
because real-estate is the key in our business. When you are putting such a large amount of money, and the way we buy land and the way we construct our buildings, it is not as marketable as any other property. It is not very easy to sell if you want to exit.
The best definition of Culture 
Culture is essentially people having the same mindset, the same training, the same passion, interest in the business, this is the challenge. In fact, it’s the number one challenge.
Data is important but not be all
Retail is very complicated from a numbers point of view, the number of parameters and data points are many. I came from an MNC, for the first three years I also used to think I will do a lot of analysis but it doesn’t work that way. That analysis is nice to see, it is nice to give you learning and knowledge about how the business is working. But not all or not most of the data can be used to drive something significantly different than what is already happening.
Making business Bezos proof
Broadly I can tell you 14-15% gross margin is a good gross margin, considering the kind of PAT, ROCE we are generating. I mean, if we will do more than that then we would be creating an opportunity for somebody else to come and disrupt us
And our view is, let’s not focus too much on margin, let’s focus on growing the business, let’s focus on all other metrics, margin is an outcome, it will come. But if I operate efficiently, if my turnover per square feet grows, if I grow in new markets and new markets also allow me to perform better, my mix improves, and those are things to look at
And that’s why retail is all about focus; it’s all about the small things. If you have the tenacity to look at every small thing, minutely and repetitively, you exactly know what works and what doesn’t work. And you just build up that knowledge, keep building up that knowledge. And then you teach that to everybody in the system. And that is how you extrapolate the knowledge and try to build a culture around that, broadly.
Full transcript is here

 

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