Indian multinational giant looks to combat losses from COVID-19 lockdown
Indian multinational conglomerate, Aditya Birla has hired Manish Gupta as its new group CIO. Gupta joins the company from auto components company, Motherson Group.
As group CIO at Aditya, Gupta will be responsible for “thought and action leadership for value creation by leveraging the group synergies and the power of technology,” he states.
In August, the company reported Aditya Birla Fashion and Retail experienced unprecedented disruption on account of COVID-induced shutdowns.
In the months of April and May, most of the retail network was closed, while e-commerce sales too restarted only in the 3rd week of May, when the restrictions on non-essential products were lifted. Stores started to open during the month of June, although operational hours were restricted in many places which slowed down the return to normalcy. By the end of June, nearly 80 per cent of our network had re-opened. The results of this quarter should be seen in the above context. In Q1 FY21, the sales of the Company were at Rs.323 Cr.
To combat the losses Aditya moved forward with several initiatives, including the acceleration f its digital transformation through a series of moves.
Aditya rebranded websites to ramp up own e-commerce sales. Secondly, it introduced omni-channel features such as video call sales; WhatsApp commerce; and buy- online-ship-from-store to leverage its distribution network. It also built huge scale through deeper partnerships with all the leading third-party e- commerce players.
Tags: Aditya Birla
