Despite COVID-19, the Indian Retail & Shopping Centre Industries are on verge of welcoming the festival season. The season, which commences around the month of September has been the ‘bread and butter season’ of the industry for decades now.
Inspite of the fact that COVID cases are still rising and there is an atmosphere of uncertainty in the world, the lockdown is now over. Cinemas and multiplexes also opening in October, along with food courts (of states which had not yet been given the green signal) and other FEC zones, and malls are hoping the coming months will play a major role in their revival. The industry – especially the F&B sector which had suffered losses worth crores – is hoping that the next few months will signal a recovery of sorts.
What Research Reports Say
As per a CRISIL analysis, the revenue of mall operators is set to halve this fiscal because of pandemic-driven lockdowns. Currently, shopping malls have a debt of around ₹4,200 crore and they have a retail space of 7.5 million sq. ft. across the country. While these malls are under pressure, CRISIL said that the impact on credit quality of these malls is limited for near-time since they are backed by “strong sponsors” and they have “high debt service coverage ratio (DSCR) of nearly 1.5 times on average.
“Food courts and cinemas, which contribute about 22 percent to the total revenues, have borne the brunt of the impact on operations due to social distancing and are also expected to take the longest to recover,” the report said.
This story is from the October 2020 edition of Shopping Centre News.
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This story is from the October 2020 edition of Shopping Centre News.
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