RE: Labour Peer Lord Waheed Alli12 Dec 2019 07:49
Meet Waheed Alli: The Labour peer suffering birth pangs of India’s answer to Asos
LAURA ONITA
Friday 5 July 2019 11:10
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The Evening Standard
Media mogul Waheed Alli founded fashion website Koovs in 2012 ( )
Nearly three years ago media mogul Waheed Alli was on the brink of losing the millions he had put into his most recent venture, Koovs, the London-listed wannabe Asos of India.
In November 2016, India’s prime minister Narendra Modi, with only four hours’ notice, took high-denomination banknotes out of circulation. The move was meant to drive money out of the shadows but, in the short term at least, it knocked the stuffing out of the economy and punctured the hyper-growth of online businesses like Koovs.
Alli, or Baron Alli of Norbury in the London borough of Croydon, to give him his full title, says: “It really hurt. A lot of people operating in our sector disappeared. We survived because of great management, because we knew what we were doing.”
The Labour peer’s know-how came from 12 years as the chairman of Asos, helping it grow from a fledgling start-up, with flat growth and losses, into the fearsome adversary it would become for the High Street, eventually stepping down in 2012.
He left “because I could tell Nick Robertson [Asos’s boss and co-founder] wanted to leave”. “If you’re the chair of a public company and the chief executive wants to leave, generally what happens, you have to find a new chief executive.
“Everybody blames you if it doesn’t work, and then whoever it is will likely want to get rid of you. Well, ‘that’s a fun three years’, I thought, and I didn’t want to do that. I said to Nick, ‘if you’re going to go, I’m going to go before you.’”
So that was that. Alli used some of the cash from his £30 million stake in Asos to build a replica of the online retailer but in India. Enter Koovs, which has finally started showing recovery signs after the demonetisation blow was followed by a tax hit from Modi’s government.
Koovs’ revenues fell 40% from £3.9 million to £2.1 million for the first half to September 30, but it narrowed its pre-tax losses by 10% to £6.4 million from £7.8 million.
Its trendy clothes, aimed at India’s emerging middle-class youth, have been selling better since, Koovs told the City in May.
It also recently raised £10.4 million from India’s largest retailer Future Group to start spending on marketing again after it had to tighten its belt in 2017.
Good news has been in short supply for a share that listed at 200p and now stands at a meagre 7p. It had to go cap in hand to investors asking for £35 million over a three-year period in 2015, just a year after Alli, who is chairman, listed the company on London’s junior AIM in 2014. He has ploughed roughly £20 million of his own cash in to date.
Despite the bumpy ride Koovs has all the ingredients Asos had to succeed long term, he thinks. “I saw a gap in the Indian market,” the 54-year-old says, resting in
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