It has been quite a roller coaster ride for the sector in the last couple of years, with demonetization impacting consumption, followed by GST throwing the trade out of gear. The stage now seems set to catch up on the elusive revenue growth. The overall rationale of rising incomes, changing lifestyle and favourable demography would remain strong drivers. The monsoon forecast for the year is normal too and should give a good fillip to rural demand and overall growth.
The now-implemented GST would help in streamlining operations and gains on warehousing and logistical costs would start flowing into margins in the coming quarters. Additionally, it would also mean marrying systems of downstream and upstream partners in the whole supply chain pipeline to get the full bang for the GST buck! The recent significant developments in e-commerce would fuel further investments into this channel with a more decisive and strategic move to upscale the e-commerce business line.
The revival of the sector would see new forays and projects and restructuring of current teams and verticals. There is an expectation of aggressive value and volume targets being taken up by the players accompanied by new product launches. Some foresee rejig of talent as well as an intrinsic demand for talent coming from a natural revival of organic growth. There would be activity around talent in R&D and new product development, also driven by the surge in Ayurvedic product categories.
Living up to the promise of e-commerce vertical would require some reverse flow of talent from the tech-world. The IT-bone of organizations should see fresh capex and talent to play a larger role in systems and tool-based active support to business processes. Considering the regulatory hawk eye on capping price increases, companies would like to wring out maximum gains from GST with more tech-savvy talent working on supply chain optimizations.
Overall, there are exciting times ahead with companies vying to infuse the best of talent across the whole spectrum of the value chain of business, ranging from front to back-end. Apart from the continued focus on execution through middle management and below, redefined strategy and a renewed focus would demand a gear-shift in the rate of pace of change itself. This would translate into an equal amount of expectation from leadership, a probable space to witness change as well.