For the 4th year running, Tequity once again attended NRF Retail’s Big Show and Expo at the Javits Center in New York on January 14-16. This year was the year of the retailer. Technology companies are trying to provide brick and mortar retailers with solutions that will empower them and allow them to remain competitive, to attract customers and keep them returning, to better manage their teams, vendors, and inventory, to obtain the analytics they need for both customer behaviour and for store and vendor management, and to be as quick and agile in-store as they are online. Revenue in the Retail market is still about 85% from brick and mortar and retailers recognize that they need to make some pretty significant changes to be able to meet the new demands and shopping habits of today’s consumers. New technologies around payments, IoT, AI, inventory management and procurement, merchandising, analytics and consumer behaviour, and much much more were on display at the hundreds of exhibitor booths over 3 levels. This year’s event was probably the busiest one we’ve had yet, with 25 meetings over 3 days. Disruption and consolidation remain a recurrent theme and we anticipate that we will see a peak in M&A activity in this market over the coming 12 to 24 months.
