ETMarkets.comRelated
Related Companies
NSE
BSE
By Tamanna Inamdar
Keep people over 60 at home as they are at high risk but do not throw the baby out with the bathwater, says the CMD of Raymond .
A lot of companies are figuring out how to survive in the middle of a pandemic. Do you see this as a big change in philosophy even at the Raymond Group? What has been your biggest learning so far?
See we are in the middle of a pandemic and it is here to stay. People are only focussing on the work from home but what are you going to work on if there is no consumption and it will happen only if you open up the markets. Now a lot of the countries in the world did a lockdown for one specific reason and the reason was that you do the lockdown, you build up your medical infrastructure and then we let it open up. But continuing to keep it in the lockdown is detrimental to the progress of business.
I am quite firmly advocating that we have to open up now. I completely empathise with the coronavirus issue and the deaths due to it but I do not think anybody is really seeing the death of businesses. Lakhs of people are losing their livelihoods. We have been in a four or five months’ lockdown. The time has come to open up and that is the only way to recovery.
Technically, we are in unlock 3.0. Most states and cities are allowing brick and mortar stores to open along with certain restrictions and containment zones. Has that not helped anyway?
Technically we are open but are we actually open? We are opening and then going back into lockdowns as and when we feel like. The motor is not firing up, you have to open it up seamlessly.
Number two, in Maharashtra the shopping malls are open, but the theatres and restaurants are not open in the shopping mall. About 85-90% of people go to a mall to watch a movie and eat something and shop on the way out. A lot of impulsive shopping happens in malls. Unless you open up the mall in totality, it doesn’t work. If you go to the mall, the theatres are right at the end because they want that traffic to go all the way in before coming out.
The last time we spoke you were fairly confident that we would see a V-shaped recovery in demand. Are you still hopeful of this big jump up in consumption when Covid ends?
In June, most industries saw a good recovery in demand but the frequent repeated lockdowns are causing a problem. Most of the wholesale markets are in locked down cities -- Mumbai, Chennai, Bangalore, Kolkata. These are very large wholesale markets which are in lockdown and they really feed the rest of the country. If you see non-lockdown markets in tier four, five, six, seven towns, there the demand is pretty good, but big markets are class one cities which are completely locked down.
There is a narrative right now that Bharat is driving demand, that there is a pickup in rural India. Is there a solid demand out there?
In certain sectors the demand has come back. In FMCG, in real estate to an extent there is demand. It is just that people are not able to go and meet their demands. We are seeing reasonably good demand in the auto component sector and engineering sectors. I genuinely believe the day we stop talking about coronavirus, coronavirus will be over.
The antibody testing that they have done is a true indicator of how many people have got coronavirus; in Delhi it was 23%, in Mumbai it is 44% that means that 44% of the people on the sample set have actually got coronavirus and then if you see the percentage of asymptomatic people, the fatality ratio looks even better. People are going to get it today or tomorrow and 99.9% of people are probably going to get it in an asymptomatic manner.
Even in the best case scenario like Mumbai if over 40% people have coronavirus antibodies, you still have 60% who do not. Are you suggesting that governments should open up everything and see what happens in a bid to build herd immunity? That way we may lose a lot of people.
People you are going to lose are for real. The people that you have unfortunately lost are for real. There is a very large unknown reported number of cases and therefore your fatality rate percentage comes down significantly. Number two, the people who are getting it and are asymptomatic are getting it irrespective whether you are in lockdown or not. Let me give you one of my favourite examples. Dharavi has four-five lakh people and the reported cases is only 3,800. Today you are reporting one or two cases from Dharavi. But an antibody test is showing 57% of people have got antibodies. Therefore, your percentage of fatality rate is far lower. In Europe, in France, in Italy, in Spain there is some resurgence but in most of these places, it has gone.
In Japan, they did not go for lockdown and social distancing and they are paying the price for it. Now they find themselves in an overwhelming situation.
India has got a much lesser strain of the virus. There may be certain cases like Japan where it might have gone up exponentially, I am not an expert to answer that question but let us look at a large part of the world. I am not belittling the situation; 700,000 have died unfortunately from coronavirus so far and out of that, almost 600,000 plus people would be over the age of 60. One of my recommendations to the government has been to open up for people who are below 60 and above 10 and the people who are in the high risk category. Keep people over 60 at home as they are at high risk but do not throw the baby out with the bathwater.
Keep people over 60 at home as they are at high risk but do not throw the baby out with the bathwater, says the CMD of Raymond .
A lot of companies are figuring out how to survive in the middle of a pandemic. Do you see this as a big change in philosophy even at the Raymond Group? What has been your biggest learning so far?
See we are in the middle of a pandemic and it is here to stay. People are only focussing on the work from home but what are you going to work on if there is no consumption and it will happen only if you open up the markets. Now a lot of the countries in the world did a lockdown for one specific reason and the reason was that you do the lockdown, you build up your medical infrastructure and then we let it open up. But continuing to keep it in the lockdown is detrimental to the progress of business.
I am quite firmly advocating that we have to open up now. I completely empathise with the coronavirus issue and the deaths due to it but I do not think anybody is really seeing the death of businesses. Lakhs of people are losing their livelihoods. We have been in a four or five months’ lockdown. The time has come to open up and that is the only way to recovery.
Technically, we are in unlock 3.0. Most states and cities are allowing brick and mortar stores to open along with certain restrictions and containment zones. Has that not helped anyway?
Technically we are open but are we actually open? We are opening and then going back into lockdowns as and when we feel like. The motor is not firing up, you have to open it up seamlessly.
Number two, in Maharashtra the shopping malls are open, but the theatres and restaurants are not open in the shopping mall. About 85-90% of people go to a mall to watch a movie and eat something and shop on the way out. A lot of impulsive shopping happens in malls. Unless you open up the mall in totality, it doesn’t work. If you go to the mall, the theatres are right at the end because they want that traffic to go all the way in before coming out.
The last time we spoke you were fairly confident that we would see a V-shaped recovery in demand. Are you still hopeful of this big jump up in consumption when Covid ends?
In June, most industries saw a good recovery in demand but the frequent repeated lockdowns are causing a problem. Most of the wholesale markets are in locked down cities -- Mumbai, Chennai, Bangalore, Kolkata. These are very large wholesale markets which are in lockdown and they really feed the rest of the country. If you see non-lockdown markets in tier four, five, six, seven towns, there the demand is pretty good, but big markets are class one cities which are completely locked down.
There is a narrative right now that Bharat is driving demand, that there is a pickup in rural India. Is there a solid demand out there?
In certain sectors the demand has come back. In FMCG, in real estate to an extent there is demand. It is just that people are not able to go and meet their demands. We are seeing reasonably good demand in the auto component sector and engineering sectors. I genuinely believe the day we stop talking about coronavirus, coronavirus will be over.
The antibody testing that they have done is a true indicator of how many people have got coronavirus; in Delhi it was 23%, in Mumbai it is 44% that means that 44% of the people on the sample set have actually got coronavirus and then if you see the percentage of asymptomatic people, the fatality ratio looks even better. People are going to get it today or tomorrow and 99.9% of people are probably going to get it in an asymptomatic manner.
Even in the best case scenario like Mumbai if over 40% people have coronavirus antibodies, you still have 60% who do not. Are you suggesting that governments should open up everything and see what happens in a bid to build herd immunity? That way we may lose a lot of people.
People you are going to lose are for real. The people that you have unfortunately lost are for real. There is a very large unknown reported number of cases and therefore your fatality rate percentage comes down significantly. Number two, the people who are getting it and are asymptomatic are getting it irrespective whether you are in lockdown or not. Let me give you one of my favourite examples. Dharavi has four-five lakh people and the reported cases is only 3,800. Today you are reporting one or two cases from Dharavi. But an antibody test is showing 57% of people have got antibodies. Therefore, your percentage of fatality rate is far lower. In Europe, in France, in Italy, in Spain there is some resurgence but in most of these places, it has gone.
In Japan, they did not go for lockdown and social distancing and they are paying the price for it. Now they find themselves in an overwhelming situation.
India has got a much lesser strain of the virus. There may be certain cases like Japan where it might have gone up exponentially, I am not an expert to answer that question but let us look at a large part of the world. I am not belittling the situation; 700,000 have died unfortunately from coronavirus so far and out of that, almost 600,000 plus people would be over the age of 60. One of my recommendations to the government has been to open up for people who are below 60 and above 10 and the people who are in the high risk category. Keep people over 60 at home as they are at high risk but do not throw the baby out with the bathwater.