A Billionaire's Path From One-Room Flat to Mega-Store Empire
- Retailer Avenue Supermarts’ stock doubles on trading debut
- Stores target homemakers on urban fringes with cheap staples
A shopper pushes a shopping cart through a D-Mart supermarket operated by Avenue Supermarts Ltd. in Thane, Maharashtra, India, on Saturday, Feb. 13, 2016. India's D-Mart supermarkets, which have managed to turn a profit in each of the last 15 years, makes money from giving customers fewer choices of no-frills products, enabling it to negotiate better prices with vendors, and by refusing to spend money on analytics, loyalty programs, social media or any other new-fangled strategies.
Photographer: Dhiraj Singh/BloombergRadhakishan Damani may be India’s Sam Walton. Like the Wal-Mart founder, he’s a self-made billionaire from humble beginnings with a successful formula for retailing.
So successful that when Damani’s 15-year-old company, Avenue Supermarts Ltd., went public last week, the stock price more than doubled on the first day of trading in Mumbai, valuing his direct family’s interest at about $3.6 billion. The reason has much to do with Damani’s strategy of offering knockdown prices on everything from lentils to laundry powder in multistory hypermarkets on India’s urban fringes.