Kathmandu Said to Plan Share Sale as Early as October

Kathmandu Said to Plan Share Sale as Early as October
Bloomberg, 22-Sep-09
By Angus Whitley

Kathmandu, the outdoor equipment retailer with shops across New Zealand and Australia, may sell shares in an initial public offering as early as next month, two people familiar with the matter said.

The Christchurch-based company, jointly owned by Goldman Sachs JBWere Pty and Quadrant Private Equity, will probably decide within two weeks whether to proceed with the sale, the people said, declining to be identified because the plans aren’t public. The IPO may raise about A$400 million ($345 million), based on preliminary estimates, one of the people said.

Kathumandu’s sale would follow that of Myer Group Pty, Australia’s largest department store operator, which plans to file for an IPO next week. The two retailers are among at least four private equity-controlled businesses that may go public in coming months to tap a cash surplus among local investors that Bank of America Merrill Lynch estimates at about A$200 billion.

Macquarie Group Ltd., Australia’s largest investment bank, and Goldman Sachs JBWere have been hired as advisers, the people said. Hayley Morris, a spokeswoman for Goldman Sachs JBWere in Sydney, and Chris Hadley, Quadrant’s managing director and a Kathmandu director, didn’t return phone calls seeking comment. Paula Hannaford, a Macquarie spokeswoman, declined to comment.

Kathmandu declined to comment, it said in an e-mailed statement.

Goldman Sachs JBWere and Quadrant led the leveraged buyout of Kathmandu for NZ$275 million ($195 million) in April 2006. In September that year, the firms bought the remaining 49 percent stake from Jan Cameron, who founded the retailer in 1987.

Camping Equipment

Kathmandu has more than 80 stores in Australia, New Zealand and the U.K., according to its Web site. The company’s products include own-branded backpacks, jackets, sleeping bags and camping equipment.

The sale may take place in late October or early November, within about a week of the Myer listing, and Kathmandu’s owners haven’t decided how much of the business to sell, the people said. The company, which also has an office in Melbourne, may opt for a dual listing in Australia and New Zealand, one of the people said.

Australian companies, most of them retailers, may announce more than A$10 billion of initial share sales by June, UBS AG, the biggest arranger of stock offerings in Australia since 2006, said this month. IPOs in the nation raised a combined A$674 million so far this year, according to the stock exchange.

Melbourne-based Myer said this month it plans to lodge an IPO prospectus on Sept. 28. The company, part-owned by Texas- based TPG Inc., may raise at least A$2 billion, according to Tribeca Investment Partners in Sydney, making it Australia’s largest offering since 2007.

Forty-five companies went public in the 12 months ended June 30, according to the operator of Australia’s stock exchange. That was the smallest number since 1993 and marked an 81 percent drop from a year earlier.

NYT Fashion Week Review: Prabal Gurung

The First Few Strides Are Looking Good
New York Times, 12-Sep-09
By CATHY HORYN

Fashion is such a complete world, wrapped in its own myths, that if the industry is in a bad state, nobody really notices. What you notice instead is someone’s shoes.

My, my: where did she get those? The fashionista’s long legs, exiting a cab on the corner of Sixth Avenue and 42nd Street, setting off a wail of honking (why hurry?) were extended by her super-size, strappy heels, probably a Givenchy model. Killer.

That’s the way it was Thursday and Friday, the opening days of the spring 2010 shows: a dozen little back-to-school wardrobe crushes. There were also some good collections.

Prabal Gurung, a relatively new designer — he spent five years at Bill Blass before he set out on his own last winter — makes sophisticated clothes. He is aware of fit. He can set a proper sleeve. He has good connections with fabric mills, which will sell him small amounts. He makes everything count.

“When I started this collection, I thought, ‘What can I do to get people to buy my clothes? ” said Mr. Gurung, a native of Nepal. That’s a worthwhile question today. Why buy a $3,000 trench-coat dress in khaki double-face silk when you can buy the look for a lot less elsewhere?

Mr. Gurung’s answer is to create clothes that aren’t really about a one-dimensional look. That’s fine for an androgynous-looking label like Wayne.

On Thursday in a stripped-down loft in Chelsea, with a D.J. playing, the designer, Wayne Lee, presented a skinny silhouette of draped jersey T-shirt dresses, leggings split at the knees and gauzy minis that looked tied on the body. At some point the cement grays and whites blurred into the background, the low sky over the Hudson. Did the hard-edged clothes look familiar? A little.

Mr. Gurung knows he has to do something particular, with more depth, if he wants to stand out. If his first collection, shown last February, emphasized tailoring, this one displayed his skills at draping. Also, Mr. Gurung has added a few sportswear looks: slim trousers with diagonal seams or ribbon ties at the ankles, sleeveless silk jackets.

The most interesting dresses were a crisscross of fabric, fitted but not tight and more suggestive of pretty packaging than bondage. A cocktail dress in deep royal blue silk had a doughnut swirl of fabric on one shoulder. From a single piece of fabric, he worked a flat bow into the lapel of a cream pantsuit. There was a too-much-ness to everything that made for a nicely twisted sensibility.

Have you ever become completely irritated by a box of chocolate? You know the kind: concept chocolate, artfully arranged in a just-so box, flavors exotic and trying. I’m afraid that was my overall reaction to Jason Wu’s collection on Friday at the St. Regis Hotel.

Mr. Wu has a pretty good eye for color and prints. This season he plays with broken-wave prints (he called them Rorschach prints in his show notes) and some silk or denim tweeds with the small-grid pattern of industrial screens. For some reason I liked the idea of a slim, hooded tracksuit in dark tweed. It’s wearable and, at the same time, just a little out of it. A tweed mini-sheath with whorls of staple-like embroidery was lovely.

But a banality creeps into the picture. Whereas Mr. Gurung manages to take lightly the notion of feminine packaging, Mr. Wu treats it with a prissiness. Waists are defined and ribbon-tied. There are peplums aplenty. You suspect that Mr. Wu, like many designers, has spent a few hours gazing at the play clothes of Claire McCardell. Yet his cuffed shorts look unplayful and certainly not original. Though he tries.

He should try a little less hard is the answer. Not everything in life is a spotless decorator interior or a magazine spread. He should loosen up a bit. And why the uniformly short hemlines, six inches above the knee? That in itself is the sign of a fairly conformist outlook.

The scene at Elie Tahari’s presentation on Thursday felt like an industry cocktail gathering. The GQ guys are here! The models kept whisking past, on a continuous loop. (“Every seven minutes,” Mr. Tahari said.) There were little things to eat. The clothes were perfectly comprehensible: softly draped dresses and sarong skirts, smart-looking linen shorts and a trim jacket, blasts of orange silk, and a tailored denim shirt with a lovely starchiness.

Then it was out onto 42nd Street toward the wailing taxis and Ms. Hot Shoes.

Saleways slapped Rs 114 million in VAT fine

Saleways slapped Rs 114 million in VAT fine
myrepublica, 9-Sep-09
MILAN MANI SHARMA

Inland Revenue Department (IRD) has slapped value added tax (VAT) and penalty of Rs 114 million to Saleways Departmental Store after its investigation proved the store of evading tax in a large scale.

The company had not issued VAT bill and had not paid VAT even after collecting the tax from the customers, a source told myrepublica.com. "The evasion amount actually stood at Rs 57 million. The overall figure touched Rs 114 million due to fine and penalty," he stated.

This has made Saleways the largest ever case of VAT evasion unearthed by the department so far.

The department had initiated investigation against the departmental store after executing a smooth raid on the basis of information provided by an insider two months ago. It had seized its books of accounts, computers and other documents.

The investigation had started with Saleways sales store in Kathmandu. But when the investigating officers dug out its exclusively hidden procurement and sales records, they had extended the investigation to the store´s main outlet in Pokhara as well.

"We managed to conduct the first ever comprehensive study on how the trader manipulated his book of accounts and electronic entries to evade the taxes," said a source.

However, despite repeated calls from the IRD, the promoter of Saleways did not show up at the department to collect the penalty notice and the letter on Tuesday. "We will wait till 2 pm on Wednesday. If he still did not turn up, we will personally deliver the letter to the store at around 3 pm," said the source.

Sudhir Pradhananga of Saleways, meanwhile, said that he has not received any letter or notification from IRD so far. "We will decide on our future action once we get the letter," he stated.

Gayatri Devi

Gayatri Devi, Maharani of Jaipur, died on July 29th, aged 90
The Economist, 20-Aug-09

Though India has not been ruled by princes for many decades, it is not hard to find princesses about the place. Bollywood stars, for example, in sheaths, shades and bling, whose every move and change of wardrobe is recorded in flashy magazines; fashionistas, aping Kareena’s T-shirt or Priyanka’s bobbed hair, who spend their afternoons eating ice cream in Delhi’s malls; and the VIPs, or VVIPs, who force their cars through the traffic with horns blaring, and who refuse the indignity of being searched at airports.

In contrast to these one may sometimes find, at high tea at the Delhi Polo Club or in the lounge of the Taj hotel, the genuine article. Gayatri Devi was among the most famous of these. Her beauty was astonishing, praised by Clark Gable, Cecil Beaton and Vogue, but liner or lipstick had nothing to do with it. She had a maharani’s natural poise and restraint. From her grandmother, she had learned that emeralds looked better with pink saris rather than green. From her mother, she knew not to wear diamond-drop earrings at cocktail parties. A simple strand of pearls, a sari in pastel chiffon and dainty silk slippers were all that was required. The fact that she looked equally good in slacks, posing by one of the 27 tigers she personally eliminated, or perched, smoking, on an elephant, merely underlined the point. She was a princess, and a princess could make Jackie Kennedy appear almost a frump.

Money was never lacking in her life. As the daughter of Prince Narayan of Cooch Behar, in West Bengal, she grew up with dozens of staff and governesses recommended by Queen Mary. Thirty horses, six butlers and four lorryloads of luggage accompanied the family to their holiday cottage. “Broomstick”, as the family called her—other members were “Bubbles” and “Diggers”—was polished up in Lausanne and Knightsbridge, where she rather redundantly took a secretarial course. Her future husband, the Maharajah of Jaipur (“Jai” to her) first appeared at Woodlands, the family home in Kolkata, resplendent in an open-top green Rolls Royce. When she married him in 1940 her presents included a Bentley, a hill-station house and a trousseau that was left for collection at the Ritz in Paris. Their life came to revolve round the polo seasons in which he starred: winter and spring in India, summer in Windsor or Surrey, the thundering chukkas interspersed with plentiful champagne.

Yet there was an oddity about Gayatri Devi. She was a tomboy who liked to keep company with the servants, worrying about their wages, and with the mahouts, learning their songs and stories of elephants. After meeting Jai at the age of 12 she began to wish she could be his groom, fortuitously brushing his beautiful hand as she handed him his polo stick. Distinctions between raja and praja, prince and people, did not bother her, and she could be as cavalier about the yawning social divide between women and men. As Jai’s third wife, she should have been in purdah in a “city” of 400 other lounging and sewing women, watching the world through filigree screens. Instead she kept him company in the palace, riding and big-game hunting, or flying to Delhi in her private plane to shop. And she set up a girls’ school in Jaipur through which, she hoped, other daughters of the nobility might eventually learn to stick up for themselves.

The perfumed prison
Independence in 1947 brought a democratised India and the replacement of the 562 princely states with centralised, socialist government, but her attachment to “my people” did not change. Command, like style, came naturally to her. In both Cooch Behar and Jaipur, arriving becomingly wind-blown at the wheel of her Buick or her Ferrari, she would be greeted with flowers and incense and with deep prostrations in the dust. The villagers trusted her to help them, so she tried. That intimate understanding between ruler and ruled, she often said later, was sadly missing from modern India. It went with the crumbling of modern Jaipur which, under the maharajahs, had been a glorious desert city of wide avenues, palaces, peacocks and pink walls. She always saw it that way.

In 1960, having asked Jai’s permission and summoned the party secretary to the palace, she joined the liberal Swatantra party to oppose Jawaharlal Nehru’s left-wing Congress. She did not like socialism or five-year plans. A run for parliament two years later for the Rajasthan constituency gave her the world’s largest landslide, 192,909 votes. But this was hardly surprising. The people were voting for “Ma”, their princess, an exquisite figure in pearls and pale chiffon enthroned on a palanquin of carpets, who nevertheless called them her sisters and her brothers.

She continued to field their problems to the end of her life, though her political career as such did not long outlast a spell in Delhi’s Tihar prison in 1975, under Indira Gandhi. The charge was currency offences, based on a few Swiss francs found in her bungalow among the jade, rose-quartz, Lalique and Rosenthal. The prime minister seemed mostly to object to her aristocracy. Gayatri Devi softened the blow by pouring French perfume into the open sewer in her cell. As it ran through the building, Asia’s largest prison and one of its worst, other prisoners gathered to inhale the wafting vapours, the true scent of royalty.

User’s Guide: How to Start Your Own Food Truck

User’s Guide: How to Start Your Own Food Truck
NY Magazine, 9-Aug-09
Ben Leventhal

In the two years since New York published an extensive guide called “Cartography,” the city’s enthusiasm for street food has only increased. Trucks and carts, once the purview of recent immigrants, are now alternative gigs for displaced recession victims or starter dream jobs for anyone who ever wanted to own a restaurant but couldn’t make the numbers crunch. Before you fire her up, however, there are a few things you should know about operating a food truck, from getting a license to making sure you don’t get knifed by the halal guy next to whom you just parked (spoiler: You’re going to get knifed by the halal guy).

Startup/Operating Costs: Though trucks are a small business, they still require a significant investment. Costs include the truck, permit acquisition, supplies, security, insurance, and truck storage, among other things. Some of the costs are obvious, and some are not. Truck parking, for example, may not seem like an expense, but the Department of Health requires all trucks to be stored and maintained at a food-truck commissary, where you’ll pay rent for things like access to clean water and refrigeration. The less you need your truck to do, the cheaper it is. Treats Truck, which bakes its goods off-site, was born in 2007 with $80,000 in capital.

According to one business plan we’ve seen (but never came to fruition), a pizza truck seeking $300,000 in start-up capital expected to make money right away. High volume and excellent margins can be a reality for trucks. For this pizza concept the profit margin was estimated to be over 50 percent, as compared to a good restaurant, where the margins aren’t greater than 10 percent, if you're lucky.

Permits: The Rules of the City of New York, the abstruse, hulking set of guidelines that regulate activities ranging from operating a street cart to carrying a handgun, stipulates that two permits are required: a Mobile Food Vendor License for you and a Mobile Food Vending Unit Permit for your truck. The former is a matter of paperwork and a few classes. The latter is not, as the city stopped issuing them ten years ago, according to a representative at the Department of Consumer Affairs, and there has been a cap of 3,100 licenses since 1979 (5,100, if you count fruit and vegetable carts, too; a bill has been introduced to raise the cap to 25,000). The permits are distributed via lotteries. Veterans are eligible for certain exceptions and receive priority status in the permit lotteries, which are held periodically, according to Elliot Marcus, associate commissioner for the Bureau of Food Safety and Community Sanitation. And the rep over at the Department of Consumer Affairs did tell us that you can get an exception from the Parks Department or a hospital to operate on their property.

Indeed, the process is extremely complex and loopholed, and any exception will increase your start-up costs significantly. The Times ran a story on this recently, as did the Village Voice. Also, "some people are operating carts legally and some aren’t," hinted our Consumer Affairs operator.

The upshot: Your only real option for getting a permit is the black market, where you can either buy a permit illegally, mostly in Queens, for between $5,000 and $20,000, or partner with an existing license holder, for cash and a portion of profits, say 10 percent of sales. If you’re interested in pursuing one of these options, head to a food-truck commissary (we’ll get to those in just a moment) or ask your favorite truck operator, who might have heard about an available permit via word of mouth. (Note that the NYPD arrested six people last month on charges of fraud counts related to illegal food-vending permits, so brokers — and permits — are harder to find.)

One important footnote here is that while the brokering of permits is highly illegal, once you’ve secured the permit, the Department of Health does very little at present to police these rogue permits. And, Marcus concedes, there are many loopholes. For example, "There’s absolutely no requirement that a permit holder works the cart. I could have a permit and hire people [to work] seven days a week and monitor what they do," he says. "And that would be completely legal .. In the grand scheme of things, it’s not the biggest health priority for us."

The Truck: This is the relatively easy part, as food trucks are readily available online. Budget $75,000 to $100,000 for the acquisition and retrofitting of the truck. (Kenny Lao bought his Rickshaw Dumpling Truck on the "Commercial Trucks" section of eBay.) To ensure that your rig passes Health Department approval, Sean Baskinski of the Urban Justice Center’s Street Vendor Project recommends Workman Cycles in Ozone Park (800-BUY-CART) for the job. The garage does enough truck work to be well versed and up-to-date with DOH code. (There’s also Steve’s Sheet Metal in Woodside, but ’Steve’ just got arrested for permitting fraud. True.)

Location, Location, Loc … hey, who slashed my tires?: City codes make certain streets and areas off-limits to food vendors, so consult the list supplied by the Street Vendor Project when you’re picking a spot. There is an unspoken law of the street that says seniority plays — and that if you try to park on a corner or stretch that has long been occupied by someone else, you will pay a hefty price. We asked Kenny Lao why he doesn't just set up shop in the meatpacking district, which on a weekend night would seem as high-volume as locations come, and he indicated that the reason was in part the threat of violence from existing vendors.

Still feeling the Churros y Chalupas truck, champ? Most of the big restaurateurs in the city have passed on trucks because of the complications around permits and location. (Indeed, the Street Vendor Project is now actually offering a class on it.) But, don’t let that scare you: good luck. Let us know when you fire up the Twitter.

Related Links
Cartography Revisited: An Updated Map of New York Street Food
The Street Vendor Project
New York’s twenty best food carts ranked, in order
And other essential street-cart questions answered
The 50-Vendor Poll
Wall Street Journal: Food Truck Nation
Wall Street Journal: Top 10 Lunch Trucks Around the Country

Yankee Fast Food Chains Enter Nepal

With Sept comes KFC, Pizza Hut
ekantipur, 23-Apr-09

Come September, the world's two best known fast food chains will come to Kathmandu -KFC, also known as Kentucky Fried Chicken, and Pizza Hut.

Both KFC and Pizza Hut are being brought by R.J. Crops who owns the soft drink company Varun Beverages, the manufacturers of Pepsicola in Nepal. R.J. Crops has the franchise of both for India. Both these food chains will be opened at Annapurna Complex, Durbar Marg. There will be two separate teams to handle daily operation.

KFC is the world's most popular chicken restaurant chain specialising in Original Recipe, based in Louisville, Kentucky, USA. KFC was founded by Colonel Harland Sanders in 1952 and primarily sells chicken in pieces, wraps, salads and sandwiches. While its primary focus is fried chicken, KFC also offers a line of roasted chicken products, sides and desserts. Sanders sold the entire KFC franchising operation in 1964 for US $2 million. Since then, it has been sold three more times, most recently to PepsiCo. It made it part of its Tricon Global Restaurants division, which has now been renamed Yum! Brands.

The original handwritten recipe is kept locked away at the KFC corporate headquarters in Louisville, Kentucky as a closely-guarded secret. Only two members within the Yum! corporation know the recipe in its entirety.

Pizza Hut is the world's largest pizza restaurant chain and international franchise based in Addison, Texas, USA. Pizza Hut offers different styles of pizza along with side dishes including pasta, buffalo wings, breadsticks, and garlic bread. It has approximately 34,000 restaurants, delivery-carry out units, and kiosks in 100 countries.

Pizza Hut is also one of the flagship brands of Yum! Brands, Inc. Pizza Hut is the world's largest pizza chain with over 12,500 restaurants across 91 countries. In India, Pizza Hut has 137 restaurants across 36 cities.

R.J. Crops is one of PepsiCo India's largest franchisee bottler having operation in India, Nepal and Africa. Of late, this group also has investment in Nepal's housing sector. The Mega housing project - Park View Horizon in Dhapasi is being built by this group.