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Leisure Pays! (Contn.) The playing fields
Space isn't really a problem even in choked metropolises like Delhi and Mumbai. Most people prefer to restrict their leisure activities to the weekend and do not really mind travelling a bit to reach their destination. Expectedly, the highways leading out of Delhi and Chennai are dotted with amusement parks. For the love of money
Sustaining a leisure business, especially one built around recreational activities like gaming, isn't easy. Says Dipankar Haldar, a consultant with KSA Technopak: ''The very nature of the business is such that it thrives on excitement and innovation. People need a reason to keep coming back.'' Agrees P.K. Vinod, the Marketing Head of Kishkindha, a joint venture between the Malaysia-based Berjaya Holdings and film-production company Navodaya, and the largest amusement park among the cluster of these around Chennai: ''We have to introduce something every three years. If we don't, the number of people visiting us declines.''
Worse, activity-based centres run the risk of being based on things that go out of fashion quickly. Ask Mukesh Goyal, the entrepreneur behind Ahmedabad's once-successful (and it's only two years old) water park who's seen the Rs 10 crore he's pumped in to sustain customer interest go waste: ''Customers are mad. When they like something, they go berserk over it. Then we pump in money to meet demand and they lose interest.'' Stories like this will become rarer as large companies enter the business. Apart from being able to invest periodically in the business, these corporates will approach the business of leisure as they do any other business. Explains S.K. Nanda, Managing Director, Gujarat State Finance Corporation: ''Money will not be that much of a problem once the big guys enter the business. These companies will also come in with better business plans and a research-based understanding of the market.'' He points to the Rs 100 crore that the DLF Group has invested in its Gurgaon golf course to prove his point. The man may have a point: up-scale malls really took off after the entry of the (Ajay) Piramal Group and the Ansals; food-retailing after that of the RPG Group's Foodworld. If these companies succeed, they'll end up proving that fun is, at the end of the day, a dashed serious business. -Additional reporting by R. Chandrasekhar and Nitya Varadarajan |
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The leisure phenomenon may have started
south of the Vindhyas, but it is now national in scope. Ahmedabad, for
instance, could see as many as 29 leisure hot spots like multiplexes,
malls, water parks, and amusement parks being set up over the next two
years. And Chennai still remains on top of the heap. That's where Karti
Chidambaram, (son of former Finance Minister P. Chidambaram, if that's
relevant) runs a hot spot Down Under, that boasts a four-lane bowling
alley, pool and snooker tables, video games, a karaoke bar, a dance floor,
and a theme restaurant. He's now considering expanding to cities like
Bangalore and Coimbatore through the franchise route. Indeed, bowling
centers and pool bars-with hard-to-miss names like Snowbowling and Wild
West-are now part of the Chennai cityscape.
It doesn't take much to get into the
leisure business. For as little as Rs 2 lakh one can have a mid-sized pool
bar up and running (which could explain the proliferation of this leisure
format). Bowling arcades are a little more expensive: a four-lane one
could set the investor back by a cool Rs 1.5 crore. The real big-ticket
items are water parks (estimated cost for one with a nominal five rides:
Rs 10 crore), amusement parks (using the same definition: Rs 40 crore),
shopping malls (a function of real estate prices really, but around Rs 50
crore for a mid-sized one, and golf courses (Rs 50 crore).
