Chairman of New Zealand's Postie Plus Group (PPG) has urged retailers who are suffering in the 'sluggish' economy to get online or accept failure.
At the group's annual address yesterday Richard Punter of PPG, which operates Postie, Babycity and school uniform business SchoolTex, said he is constantly astonished by the number of retailers who 'steadfastly refuse to acknowledge the strategic importance of e-commerce' and social networking channels such as Facebook and Twitter.
“Such retailers will suffer the ignominious fate of irrelevancy and ultimately failure if they cannot or will not change,” Punter said. “It is very hard to accept that your bricks and mortar, so hard won over many years, can be threatened by a bunch of people in a faceless office with a slick supply chain and some great web pages.”
Punter went onto say that the PPG accepts the e-tail challenge and has been working hard to build an e-commerce business.
“We are determined that we will build this business to sit seamlessly alongside our bricks and mortar to ensure we enjoy the best of both worlds,” Punter said. “The NZ economy is very sluggish and retail companies have simply been moving between major events without any real certainty of momentum in consumer spending, which still may be some months away.”
As reported last month on ragtrader.com.au, the group's first quarter sales were $23.968million, down 4.26 per cent on the same period last year.
Looking ahead Punter said he believes the group should eventually be twice the size that it is today, through organic growth and further acquisitions.