Magazines Archives - 2009 December

Retail crime cost Asia-Pac retailers US$17.9b
Story 11 - News

Global retail theft for 2009 amounted to US$114.82 billion, accounting for 1.43% of sales and growing by 5.9% from the previous year, said a recent study released by the Centre of Retail Research in Nottingham, UK. Of the 41 countries surveyed in the latest edition of the Global Retail Theft Barometer
(GRTB), shrinkage in the Asia-Pacific region grew an average of 4.2% from the year before, to 1.24%.

Across the nine Asia-Pacific countries surveyed, shrinkage cost retailers about US$17.9 billion. India had the highest shrinkage rate of 3.2%, while Taiwan and Hong Kong saw the lowest rate of 0.89% and 0.92% respectively. Only Singapore faced a 0.02% drop in shrinkage this year, with India spotting the largest increase by 0.1%.

This year, the study also incorporated China (Shanghai, Beijing and Guangdong), Hong Kong and Taiwan in the region for the first time, while in India, only the “organised retail sector” was considered for the study. It noted that over 50% of offenders in the region were shoplifters, with Australia, Malaysia
and India experiencing the highest increase in shoplifting in the past year.

“The average Asia-Pacific shrinkage rate is normally lower than other regions of the world, and this is also true for 2009,” noted Professor Joshua Bamfield, director of the Centre for Retail Research and author of the study.

“Shoplifting cost retailers US$9.2 billion, employee theft and fraud, US$4.0 billion, suppliers’ and vendors’ frauds, almost US$1.4 billion, and the costs of loss prevention were US$2.5 billion,” Bamfield summarised, adding that the total costs of retail crime in the Asia-Pacific region amounted to a total
of US$17,123 million.

Bamfield continued that, worldwide, retailers attributed one-third of the increase in shoplifting to the economic recession. “There is some criminological evidence that crime rises as unemployment
rises and there are indications that crime is a much more important issue for retailers now than two or three years ago,” he said.

He also pointed out that this year, while retailers had cut back on their loss prevention and security spend by US$900 million worldwide, “a US$10 billion increase in theft is very significant”. He
added: “It highlights the importance of continued advancement and improvement of loss-prevention programmes, as reducing theft is key to the success and growth of retailers’ businesses.”

In the region, retailers spent US$24.5 billion, an average 0.17%, on loss prevention and security, by far
the lowest of all the regions surveyed, about half less than the global average of 0.31%, which falls short of the US$930 million invested by retailers last year as a result of the downturn.

“With numerous studies supporting the conclusion that investing in and focusing on loss prevention decreases retail shrink, we hope this year’s Global Retail Theft Barometer provides the data retailers need to support their loss-prevention efforts,” said Bamfield.

Conducted from July 2008 to June 2009, the third edition of the GRTB — and the ninth edition in Europe — was funded by the global security solutions group Checkpoint Systems Inc.

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