Sundeep Reddy Gummadi
We look forward to delivering more high quality spaces
W
hat are your top 3 concerns for the industry with respect to COVID-19? The first concern I believe, is a huge fall in demand. Secondly, there is a threat of subsequent fallout of demand over a prolonged period, in case the COVID-19 situation doesn’t improve or a vaccine takes longer time to materialise. Apart from that, I see pressure 28 |
July 2020
building on retail businesses; their growth trajectory would not be the similar to what they experienced pre-COVID times. Remember, when it comes to warehouse space, retail is a far bigger consumer than the e-commerce segment, although the latter is growing rapidly. However, I see the demand from traditional retail companies for new warehouse space mellowing down in the coming years.
The Zeromile Warehousing Park, Hyderabad’s biggest pure warehousing facility with a capacity of 1.3 million sq ft of Grade A warehousing space spread over 50 acres, will be one-of-a-kind and most sought after destinations by e-commerce, traditional retail and cold chain businesses. Sundeep Reddy Gummadi, Founder & Director, Zeromile Warehousing speaks to Upamanyu Borah, more on their pioneering efforts towards making Hyderabad a warehousing hub in the central Indian region, while also elaborating on the country’s warehousing sector which is seemingly prepared and ready with risk management and customer retention strategies, infrastructure initiatives and rapid digitisation to embrace the wave of a pre-COVID market.
There has been a rapid increase in the number of large organised players in the market. They are investing and building warehouses faster and with higher quality (moving from Grade B to A and A-plus), as their customer’s demand upgrades. What is the sudden surge behind this? Indian supply chain environment has seen two major events in the last 4-5 years. One is consolidation of warehousing space that happened, the precursor to which was the GST implementation. Pre-GST, due to taxation and regulation issues, companies had to establish warehouses across all states where they operated and this needlessly increased the capital expenditure of businesses. These things changed as soon as the GST came into force, it removed state boundaries and abolished check posts. Companies were then able to consolidate their warehousing and supply chain operations across industrial clusters outside central locations which are able to cater to a 360 degree market. This also offered many companies
