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Future of Retail Keynote Speaker, e-commerce
From Uganda to Congo, India to Vietnam, we will continue to see an almost identical retail experience. Almost all shops in the whole world will continue to be the roughly the size of a single shipping container – never much wider or deeper or higher. One outlet next to another for mile after mile. COVID had no impact on this megatrend despite all the media hype.
Such shops, typically with brick walls and tin roofs, are often living rooms of families who own them, and bedrooms at night. Lit by a single light bulb, such stores have an almost identical range of products as ten or twenty other similar shops within a few hundred metres. We see clusters of clothes shops, clusters of metal working shops, clusters of furniture shops. The most important rule in retail location has always been co-opetition. And this will be as true in the slums of a megacity as on the streets of Paris or New York. Jewellers will continue to cluster, fish sellers will cluster. Retail clustering will dominate physical retail globally for the next 100 years.
Malls will take off in all emerging markets. At the same time, expect growth in top-down mass-retailing in emerging markets, despite e-commerce. Big companies will invade a completely new area where there has never been a single store a fraction of the size before. The first mall in a new area will usually be relatively informal, not air-conditioned, housing smaller shops. And then premium malls will follow, identical in many ways to malls in Europe, Singapore, Beijing and North America.
* "Life with AI - How to survive and succeed in a super-smart world" - Patrick Dixon's latest book on AI is published in September 2024 by Profile Books. It contains 38 chapters on the impact of AI across different industries, government and our wider world, including future impact of AI on emerging markets including retail trends.
Read more: Future of Retail in Emerging Markets - Asia, Latin America, Africa - boom of chains and informal retailers. Impact of e-commerce and online marketing, and how traditional retail will survive - retail trends keynote speaker