Biyani looking to exit more fashion brands

Kishore Biyani, India’s largest retailer, is looking at divesting stake in more fashion brands.

Earlier, Future group had mentioned that the company plans to sell stake in fashion brands such as Biba & AND. But Biyani is not going to stop at that.

“We are going to look at offloading stake in more fashion brands, like Clarks, Celio and Turtle, in the coming year,” C P Toshniwal, CFO, Future Retail, said on Thursday.

Future Group has a 50:50 joint venture with UK-based footwear maker Clarks since 2011.

Though the British brand was present in India even before that, it was on a distribution model.

In the India operations of French apparel company Celio, on the other hand, Future has a 49.99% stake. Celio has earlier expressed interest to hike its stake in the joint venture to 100%.

As for Turtle, Future has 26% stake in the apparel brand.

Other fashion brands in the group’s portfolio include AND, Biba, IndusTree Crafts and Holii.

Earlier this year, after selling stake in Pantaloons and its insurance business, Biyani had said that the company was planning to drop the stake sale in the fashion formats.

However, the fact that the debt still stands at close to Rs 4,800 crore is probably prompting the company to divest more stake, believe experts.

It’s not just fashion brands. Even eZone and Hometown are highly likely to be on the block next year.

Toshniwal said HomeTown is not yet profitable and therefore they can’t sell the business right now. However, the home furnishing part of the business is likely to turn around in a year and the company will  consider hiving it off after that.

“We are always looking at it. After all, we are in the business of buying and selling. But we will be doing it once we have made the brand profitable,” said Toshniwal.

Earlier, the company was also planning to merge eZone and Hometown under one umbrella.

But now, the merger will depend on the buyer, said Toshniwal. “It depends on who the interested party is and if they want just the electronic business or the home furnishing one too. We will merge it only if the buyer wants it.”

In order to make HomeTown profitable, the group is going for smaller size stores. Instead of the 1 lakh sq ft stores that it had earlier, it is now cutting the store size to 25,000 sq ft on an average. Changes are also being made based on the product size, with bigger furniture holding smaller items such as bed covers and linen.