Brick and mortar businesses won’t exist in 2023

Another seven years down the line, the brick and mortar business in India may cease to exist in their current form. In an increasingly digitalized world, and the pace at which India is covering digital ground there are chances that the brick and mortar business will move towards e-commerce by 2023, says Niti Aayog, CEO, Amitabh Kant.

Kant, who was speaking at the TiE Delhi-NCR and Lufthansa organized Startup Expo said, "India is the only country with a billion mobile phones and bio-metrics. In the last 6-7 months, we have added almost 28 crore bank accounts. In the last 45 years we have given license to 19 banks but in the last nine months we have given licence to 23 payment banks, and many of them are telecom companies including Paytm and Airtel. The brick and mortar sector will go dead."

With the rapidly advancing technology, as products and services move online and the world gets connected, traditional businesses are bound to go digital, something that is already clearly visible in the retail industry.

"We are a just close to $ 18-19 billion market in e-commerce and take it from me we will be a $300 billion market by 2023. E-commerce is at the very beginning of its radical revolution and as the Internet and smartphones grow, you will also see leapfrog in technology," he said.

Even the banking sector won’t be immune to this change. He explained that the traditional banking sector in the form of brick and mortar presence banking will soon face a decline."It will all be mobile, telephonic transaction. India will leapfrog again. This is because today we are about 350 million using the Internet but 2020-23 there will be about 1 billion people in India using the Internet. Similarly, usage of the Internet will increase with more people on smartphones. A billion Indians with access to the Internet, bio-metric and using the smartphones we will radically alter the world," said Kant.

"Even manufacturing world is getting digitized and the small and medium enterprises must understand that it is digitization of manufacturing process which will lead to higher level of productivity," he further added.

"Across the world, whether you look at trends in Japan, US or Germany, everywhere is getting digitized. It is inevitable," he said.