What are the few areas you feel that Kishor Biyani went wrong forcing him to sell the Future group to Reliance Industries?

To be fair, there were a number of areas where Kishor Biyani went wrong and worse still, did not take any course correction. Here are a few of them.

· He overestimated the willingness of people to spend in malls and underestimated the impact that online would have, especially when bandwidth became cheap.

· He overestimated the potential of the mall model, which was unviable in the first place as was evident from the numerous malls that were shutting down regularly.

· Biyani wrongly applied the Wal-Mart model. That is surprising for a man who fancied himself as the Indian equivalent of Sam Walton, the founder of Wal-Mart.

· Biyani’s model was more urban and mall driven whereas Wal-Mart had a business model that actually took the store as close to the customer as possible.

· Future malls remained a urban and quasi urban phenomenon whereas the model of Wal-Mart was more of a small town model extended to large areas with discounts.

· A big shortfall for the Future group was that they never thought of the ecosystem as a whole, but purely looked at ways and means of expanding sales.

· On other hand, Reliance focused on the front end sales as also on the back end procuring, inventory management, centralized order level system etc.

· In a way, Kishor Biyani embarked on a reckless expansion program without waiting for the business potential to actually manifest the results, which D-Mart did better.

· The big mistake was too much debt and the debt-driven aggression. The COVID pandemic just unravelled the risks.