Fun, incentives & sales
Paul Topping is talking to Frontier from his new shop in Delhi, a store that represents the first serious effort by an international retailer in the country’s capital to provide a travel retail offer that meets global standards. At the time of interview, Alpha Asia has been trading in Delhi for three days and Topping and his staff have been up until three in the morning stocking shelves. He might be tired, but luckily Topping is eager to talk about the Delhi project.
“On the basis that my father was a preacher, my problem is I don’t stop talking,” he laughs. “Delhi is seen by everybody as the jewel in the crown – it certainly has the quality passenger profile, with over 5m international passengers.”
Alpha Asia opened there last month with 5,500sqft of departure retailing and 1,500sqft of
arrivals. “The Indian traveller is known to be one
of the biggest spenders in the world – the view is that over 30% of the business in the Middle East is from the Indian subcontinent,” he comments. “Delhi is going to be for Indians who have historically not found what they want here, and now find us to have the range and the price-points that they’re looking for.”
The spend per passenger at the airport was US$2-3 before Alpha’s arrival; Topping predicts that the company will double that figure in its first year of trading. “I think it was low before because people had no confidence in purchasing at Delhi airport
because of prices and stock availability… we have doubled the liquor range, quadrupled the confectionery range, and put wine and perfumes in where there was no real offer before,” he explains.
Topping joined the retail business on the British high-street before assuming responsibility for the retail and catering division of Trust House Forte, which had contracts for a number of UK airports including Heathrow, Manchester and Birmingham. Topping’s love of the sun, fostered during his upbringing in Africa, soon got the better of him and he took the role of international director of the Alpha Airports Group in the USA and Caribbean. His career soon veered towards Asia with the signing of the Colombo contract in Sri Lanka in 1986; a scheme which was hailed by the government as the most successful privatisation project at the time.
In the last eleven years Sri Lanka has had its fair share of problems – most prominently a tsunami that took 70,000 lives, and protracted political turbulence between the government and the Tamil Tigers, who just last month led another attack on Colombo Bandaranaike Airport. Despite these upheavals, Colombo is now Alpha Asia’s biggest operation and a US$50m business. “You’ve always got to be innovative in a difficult market,” says Topping.
So how has this UK-based group moved on from Sri Lanka to become so prominent in neighbouring India? “We’re in the Maldives, Kathmandu, Nepal, Bali and Colombo, so we have a lot of affinity to the region and that reflects in out product offer,” says Topping. “If you look at the fastest growing categories here, they are most certainly the premium malts, wines and beer.”
And its not just knowledge of what to offer that has given Alpha the edge in Delhi. The company was the first international travel retailer to enter India in anything more than a consultancy capacity when five years ago it secured a management and stock supply contract in Cochin, India’s fourth largest airport for international passengers. Though Alpha was starting from scratch there (when Topping first came to the Cochin airport site, it consisted solely of jungle), it was also aware that 98% of travellers passing through Cochin were workers from the Middle East and thus already had an element of exposure to high quality duty free.
“Our policy was to be under the Dubai price, and that still stand today,” Topping adds. The business at Cochin is still growing 40% a year, well ahead of the traffic growth, which stands at around 25%. Topping predicts that Cochin could be a US$10m business by the close of 2007.
Key to Alpha’s success in the Indian subcontinent, Topping believes, is the way it treats its staff. Alpha Asia is extremely proactive in getting its employees involved and motivated, and this is something of which Topping is particularly proud.
During the retailer’s frequent promotions, staff members wear T-shirts which don the slogan ‘fun, incentives and sales’. This, Topping enthuses, is what it’s all about. “Staff have to enjoy it, they have to get incentivised and then they’ll give you the sales… you can get the shops right, you can get the products right and you can get the promotions right, but you’ve got to have staff that want to really turn it on.”
Topping surveys his staff on a regular basis and reports 94% job satisfaction. He has also seen for himself the success of his schemes. “When I came to Asia my staff would never wear a T-shirt – they used to say that wearing a T-shirt is very downmarket and they wanted to wear a tie,” he explains. “Today when we do a promotion they want to know what sort shirt they’re going to be wearing.”
And it’s not just the sales staff who wear the grey and pink Alpha T-shirts. “We’ll be doing a staff
survey very shortly in Delhi and it could be very negative because they’ve had two weeks of chaos there,” Paul admits. “But personally I think some of them will say the opposite – when you see that the CEO is actually filling the shelf up next to you, which is what I’ve done for three days, and when you see the way I operate the business, and that I wear the same T-shirt as them….. they are very responsive to it.”
This is all part of Alpha Asia’s business strategy. “Unbelievably hyper” is how Topping describes thecompany. “I would put my promotional calendar up against anybody’s as being extremely varied and probably more active.” Such activity, Paul stresses, is not only welcomed by passengers, it is expected. “When I opened the shop in Delhi, people come to you and they say, ‘What’s the deal?’ – they want money off or something, but they must have a deal”.
For the year ahead, Topping has a number of projects in mind including an aim to repeat the success of the destination café-shop complex opened in Colombo last year, Plantations Café, in India. The concept, he suggests, could fit perfectly with one of the Indian government’s own tourism promotions, entitled ‘Incredible India’. “I think there’s a great opportunity to make Incredible India a reality in retailing, and having seen the response to things like tea and local products here in India, I think that’s going to be an opportunity for us,” he predicts.
India, of course, looks set to be awash with retailing opportunities in the next few decades. The biggest privatisation rollout of airports in the world, with the exception of China, is gathering momentum. “It’s got an economy that’s booming, it’s got a workforce that is hungry to learn, and it’s got a massive population under the age of 25,” says Topping. “In so many ways it’s the future.” n
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