M&S opened more India stores while shutting 100 at home — small cities carried growth

Marks & Spencer sells apparel, cosmetics, footwear and lingerie through large-format department stores in India, operated with Reliance Industries.

Small-city Indian shoppers — women entering the workforce with disposable income — can carry a British high-street brand's growth while its home market shrinks.

M&S entered India on its own in 2001, then partnered with Reliance Industries; by FY2019, a decade into the JV, sales were set to cross Rs 1,000 crore for the first time.

Revenues grew at a 24% CAGR in the years to FY19, with a fifth of turnover already coming from small cities, 65% of sales from womenswear and 20% from kidswear. FY18 sales were Rs 908 crore with a first-ever profit of Rs 66.3 crore after a Rs 4 crore loss the year before. With about 70 stores, M&S India planned to open nine stores every six months for two years across formats, appoint in-store fashion stylists and launch new catalogues, making India the brand's largest market outside the UK by store count — even as the parent rationalised its estate toward about 100 closures by 2022.

Small-city India offered both available real estate and first-time formal-wear customers, unlike saturated metro markets.

E-commerce growth had built fashion-brand awareness offline, lowering the cost of opening stores beyond the top 10 cities.

The JV had just proved unit economics — first profit in FY18 — making expansion defensible while the parent retrenched elsewhere.

Womenswear at 65% of sales tied the brand to the fastest-growing segment: women entering the professional workforce.

A shrinking home market and a growth market are different companies: expand where the customer is being created, and let the estate contract where it isn't.

As of February 2019, M&S India was opening nine stores every six months toward a larger small-city footprint, with India its biggest store network outside the UK. The material does not record later results.