Trent doesn't prefer selling dining tables and investors must appreciate that

Mint

5 days ago

Among Trent Ltd's key strategic priorities is its goal to stay focused on categories that drive repeat consumption. Dining tables, clearly, don't fit that bill—after all, people don't buy dining tables often.
Nuvama Institutional Equities highlighted this as one of the key takeaways from last week's analysts meeting: 'Management reaffirmed the long-term focus on India and emphasised their preference for categories that generate repeat purchases. Categories with low purchase frequency such as dining tables are not of interest."
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Trent's playbook is straightforward. It wants to build its own portfolio of brands, expand into adjacent categories like beauty, innerwear and footwear, and grow its geographic footprint. The company aims to deepen store density in attractive micro-markets to capture greater market share—a strategy that, in turn, strengthens its brand equity.
That also means it's less concerned with metrics like same-store sales growth (SSSG) or store count. However, it remains mindful of maintaining a certain threshold SSSG to protect profit margins.
To drive repeat purchases, Trent is scaling and leveraging its loyalty programme WestStyleClub, which grew 38% year-on-year in FY25 to 16.4 million subscribers. Over 90% of the company's flagship format Westside's revenues are attributable to its loyal WestStyleClub members.
Westside offers apparel, footwear and accessories, along with furnishings, decor and a range of home accessories. In FY25, Trent added 40 Westside stores and 244 Zudio outlets, while consolidating 24 stores in each format, bringing the total to 248 Westside and 765 Zudio stores, including two in the United Arab Emirates.
Read this | 'Westside lessons helped Zudio; selling apparel online inefficient'
Meanwhile, Trent is also bullish on the growth prospects of its Star format.
In the coming years, emerging categories, including beauty & personal care, innerwear and footwear, are expected to be significant growth drivers. These categories now contribute over 20% of standalone revenues led by robust volume growth.
Trent sold 50 million units of innerwear in FY25, up 47% year-on-year and 42% higher footwear units to 27 million. Volume growth of beauty products was 65% to 81 million pieces. 'Assuming an average selling price of ₹150, this implies a significant ₹1,200 crore of revenue from beauty, larger than several D2C brands," said a Kotak Institutional Equities report dated 19 June. Having said that, new categories would take time to gain meaningful scale.
Overall, the management aims to clock around 25% sales CAGR over the medium-to-long term. Analysts from Goldman Sachs India believe this is achievable and can be driven by Zudio's apparel market share going from the current about 1.5% to about 3.5% over the next five years (Goldman's thesis). The broking firm's current FY25-30 sales CAGR estimate is 24.5%.
Read this | Zudio, Trent's greatest strength, may also be its biggest weakness
In FY25, Trent's value retail fashion format Zudio, offering products at attractive prices, surpassed $1 billion dollars in sales. The company's standalone revenue stood at ₹16,668 crore in FY25, representing 40% year-on-year growth, which is nothing to sneeze at. However, growth has slowed down from the previous two years when it was close to 55% and 100% in FY24 and FY23, respectively.
As such, much of the recent underperformance in Trent's shares reflects its slower revenue growth over the past few quarters, set against a broader slowdown in consumer discretionary spending. The Trrent stock is down 27% from its 52-week high of ₹8,345 touched in October.
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'Back-ended strong store additions in Zudio should aid growth in FY26. However, recovery in SSSG across fashion and Star formats would be a key near-term monitorable," said Motilal Oswal Financial Services.