Lotte Shopping in Korea Plan to Leave to Start Cash and Carry Venture in India

NEW DELHI: South Korea's Lotte Shopping Co. Ltd., the department stores and discount stores, hypermarkets and cinemas runs, gave the project start and a cash carry venture in India to the recruitment of a team a year and a half day there.

The retailer, one of the largest in Asia, with a presence in Russia and China to Vietnam and Indonesia, recognizes the high prices of real estate and the complex nature of the retail-wholesale business at a loss in India, a person with direct knowledge of the development, he said.

The person added that it had Lotte Shopping Lotte and Carry India Pvt. Ltd., with the idea of ​​following in the footsteps of the world's largest retailers, including Wal-Mart Stores Inc. in the United States and France, Carrefour SA.

Frustrated after a waiting period of years for India to open its highly regulated multi-brand strategy, at a cost of investing abroad, have Wal-Mart and Carrefour Cash & Carry stores that sell their products started to other shops and businesses. Foreign retailers are allowed to hold 100% of the local branches of companies of retail wholesale.

Lotte had assembled a team of eight members of the senior business development, half of them Indians, Koreans and a half. The team began the topography of the cash and carry model and explore the surrounding properties in cities like Mumbai and Pune. Within four months, the team concluded that the cash-and-carry model is difficult to turn profitable in the country, which led to abandon the project company, said the person named above.

Now, Lotte Shopping has her his plans for India and his team of Korean managers have left the country or leave India with bag and baggage, the person said. India's executives have also left a ban. The company MD Jin Kim K has also returned to South Korea.

A spokesman for the Korean Lotte Shopping said retail executives constantly traveling to India in order to assess the investment climate. The spokesman for the company "or" "waiting for an opportunity" and in the open shops in India, without specifying when. "We have two companies in India,'' he said.

Lotte Shopping had closed its office in New Delhi two years ago, although it maintains an office in Mumbai. The person familiar with the development, said Lotte, he saw little opportunity to develop their supermarkets or department stores, the burgeoning middle class in India to do justice to open, because, according to the political opposition to the liberalization of the detail of the country to foreign operators supermarket .

The political confrontation in India is due to the fear that the admission of foreign supermarket chains in a sensitive sector as most of the 12 million small businesses into bankruptcy.

Over six years, opened Lotte Shopping, a liaison office in Kasturba Gandhi Marg New Delhi to explore the retail market in the country and talking to potential partners in India, as well as the building of the unit to Lotte had the opportunity to examine the market The country is well up to the building of churches in Greater Noida or Gurgaon.

Now even more representatives of the estate left India, as former employees of plaintiff anonymity Lotte Shopping. Lotte said it plans now to focus on its retail business in China and Indonesia.