There was a time when Kishore Biyani was determined to seize the crown and be the unquestioned King of the Indian high street and the largest malls. In 2006, he had some 200 outlets including everything from supermarkets and hypermarkets to department and home product stores. He aimed to open one new outlet a day and talked about having 3,500 by 2010. “We want to capture consumer spending,” he declared without the slightest flicker of doubt about his Future Group’s ability to pull it off.
Now fast forward to today: Biyani's fending off creditors and reckons if his deal with Reliance Retail Ventures to sell for Rs 24,713 crore he struck in August last year after being battered by Covid-19 is stalled, he'll be forced to file for bankruptcy in three months. Half his stores have been shut by the pandemic and most of the rest aren't selling enough to cover costs. (The company lost Rs 59.43 billion in fiscal 2020-21 and it's got debt of Rs 207.42 billion) The banks granted Biyani a debt-restructuring deal on condition his agreement with Reliance went through – they were betting it would be easier to recover debts from Reliance Ventures which had also agreed to take on various existing debts.
That may have been a bargain-basement deal for Reliance Ventures. But there's a hitch and it's a big one. The problem is Biyani had already struck a deal in 2019 giving Amazon the right to buy a 49-per-cent stake in Future Coupons, a group company that owned 7.3 per cent of Future Retail, the group flagship. Under the deal, Amazon had the first right to buy into Future Retail in a time frame of between three to 10 years and it paid Biyani Rs 1,431 crore in December 2019.
Inevitably, Amazon took Biyani and the Future Group to court after the deal with Reliance was struck, arguing their rights. The chosen forum under the Amazon-Future Group agreement was the arbitration tribunal in Singapore. An emergency arbitration tribunal issued an injunction preventing the Future Group-Reliance Ventures deal from being completed. After a series of battles in the Delhi High Court, Amazon took the case to the Supreme Court which has just ruled in its favour.
Biyani's still weighing the legal options and plans to file a review petition before the Supreme Court. Yesterday’s court battle had a battery of legal heavyweights including, Harish Salve appearing for Biyani and Gopal Subramanium representing Amazon. But it's hard not to conclude Biyani will have a tough time in the near future.
Looking in the rearview mirror, it's possible to conclude that overweening ambition may have got the better of Biyani. But business is also sometimes about taking gambles and it's true he had to face conglomerates like Reliance with gigantic gameplans and a heap of cash for a massive shopping spree. Besides the arrival of online players like Amazon and Flipkart changed the game in ways that couldn’t easily have been foreseen in the early 2000s.
He never reached his 3,500 store goal but by 2018 Future Retail had 1,550 outlets, led by his biggest winner BigBazaar and including others like Heritage Fresh, Nilgiris, Easyday, Foodhall and Brand Factory. He also had a tie-up with W. H. Smith, the news, books and convenience conglomerate. His Future Lifestyle had around 350 outlets.
By then, though, he was also staggering under the weight of accumulated debt and the pandemic that came in 2020 piled on massively to his woes. Biyani, always frank whether he was on top of the world or hounded by bankers, admitted that Covid-19 was the very last blow. “We got into a trap to be very honest with Covid-19. In three-four months, we lost nearly Rs 7,000 crore,” he confessed at a retailers' conference.
Even more importantly, he conceded at the conference: “We did too many acquisitions in the last six to seven years.”
That was why he was forced in 2019 to strike the deal that gave Amazon the right to buy a 49 per cent stake in Future Coupons, a group company that owned 7.3 per cent of Future Retail, the group flagship and also the first right to buy into Future Retail .
But when the pandemic changed the entire picture, plunging the Future Group even deeper into debt. Biyani needed cash much more urgently to avert bankruptcy. That’s why he changed course abruptly and struck the deal with Reliance Ventures in August 2020.
What’s next? Biyani and analysts note that if he's forced to declare bankruptcy, that would lead to enormous losses for the banks. He says that the company has few actual assets that could be sold to recover debts and that its outlets are almost all rented. He also owes vendors huge amounts. RIL's share price fell more than 2 per cent Friday on the back of the court verdict to trade at Rs 2,0287 while Future Retail slid 10 per cent to Rs 58.20.
Biyani is standing in front of an abyss and the only thing that can pull him back is a fountain of cash or an easing off of Friday's Supreme Court verdict. It’s a grim plight to be in. Biyani has been able to confound the naysayers for decades. It remains to be seen if he can do it again.