Green Shoots of Bounce-Back Showing in Q3 Retail Spends, Steady Climb in Digital Payments Usage

The Retailers Association of India and Innoviti Payment Solutions unveiled the first volume of their quarterly publication on Retail Payments Insights. The report presents an overview of quarter-wise trends in store sales during the fiscal year 2019-20, in comparison corresponding period of fiscal year 2018-19 from the same cohort of stores.

Based on the report data, overall same store sales growth trends across multiple sectors, including Food & Grocery, Fashion & Apparel, Consumer Durables & IT, Jewelry, Personal Accessories, Healthcare & Wellness and Entertainment indicate that growth in Q1(AMJ) FY19-20 was strong across retail sectors, with an overall blended growth of 11%.  Q2(JAS) FY19-20 showed clear signs of slowdown across sectors with growth dropping to 3.6%.  However, the latest available Q3(OND) FY19-20 data shows an emerging reversal of this slowdown with early signs of growth recovery, possibly fueled by the festival season discounts. Across regions, South and East zone growth has been relatively stronger across quarters, showing greater resilience to the slowdown.

Mr. Rajeev Agrawal, CEO, Innoviti said “With nearly 5% of all India offline digital spends being processed through our pan-India spread of retail POS terminals, we at Innoviti have a unique bird’s eye view into emerging trends across retail categories. We are excited to partner with a renowned industry body like RAI to package this insight into regular volumes of the RAI-Innoviti Payments Insight Reports. We expect these ongoing quarterly trend reports to provide useful data insights to not just the Indian retail industry, but also broader economy watchers.”

Mr. Kumar Rajagopalan, CEO, Retailers Association of India said, “RAI - Innoviti Payment Insights aims to fill a critical gap about percentage growth in sales at category and zonal level. It gives an overview of the growth at grass roots as it is based on data collected from retail stores in 697 cities across 36 states. It gives a balanced view of how economic and macro-trends are impacting the sector based on customer payments data. The initiative is in line with RAI's mandate of developing, facilitating and propagating practices that will help grow retail in India.”     

Across retail categories, spending on staples has shown much stronger reliance to the Q2 slowdown as compared to discretionary spend categories. Over the YTD period April 2019 to December 2019, Food & Grocery spends showed a growth of ~13% which is more than double the overall blended retail growth of ~6.5%. Comparatively, discretionary categories like Fashion/Apparels showed the effects of slowdown with growth averaging 2.8%.

During the YTD period of April 2019 to December 2019, retail spends have also witnessed a steadily growing contribution of from digital payment modes as a percentage of overall store sales. In particular, digital payments contribution climbed between 4 -6% in South and East Zone, over and above a base volume growth of ~ 7.5%.

The report incorporates samples from 36 states and union territories, 697 cities and sales by value of $10 B from a diverse collection of 20,230 modern and general trade stores. While computing growth trends, the same cohort of stores is considered between the same quarter of consecutive years. Sales trends considered include estimates of cash and all forms of digital transactions.  The report will be published as a quarterly report with this first volume covering the period from April 2019 to December 2019.