CEO, Max; Director
Landmark Group
Ramanathan Hariharan or ‘Ram’, as he is popularly known, is the CEO of Max and a Board Member of the Landmark Group.
Landmark Group is one of the largest retail and hospitality conglomerate with operations in Middle East, North Africa and India, while Max is the leading value fashion retailer with revenues in excess of USD 1.2 billion.
Ram’s strength lies in retail concept development and building large profitable business models in fashion retailing. In his early days, he worked with multinational companies in their finance and logistics function, before moving to Nairobi as General Manager of a knit garment factory.
Ram joined Landmark Group in Dubai in 1994 and played a pivotal role in launching the fashion brand – Splash. In June 1996, he moved to Kuwait to expand the Group’s operations in the new territory. Realising the importance and potential of the Group’s India operations, Ram moved as Managing Director to head Lifestyle, India in 2000. Having successfully launched the brand in India, he took over the reins to conceptualize and build Max, the Group’s value fashion business in 2004. Under his leadership over the last ten years, Max has grown to become the largest value fashion brand with over 285 stores in the Middle East, North Africa and India.
“I think my key professional accomplishments are built a focused team with a vision to outperform in the market place,” Ram says of his team-building and management expertise.
Today, Ram is at the forefront formulating strategies and overseeing Landmark Group’s investments in India and Max across its countries of operation, with aggressive expansion plans in the near future. “I enjoy being in retail because it’s a dynamic industry, ever changing and provides a perfect platform to apply my strategic and operational capabilities, ” he says, adding that the primary professional challenge he faces is implementation and execution at the store level and being customer centric.
His advice for Indian retailers is to be more customer-centric. “And to achieve full potential, Indian retailers must adopt a store cluster approach to design their strategy,” he adds.
