And why not? Guest speaker was Westfield chief, Steven Lowy AM. Guests packed Sydney’s Westin Hotel Ballroom, the tables were configured to seat the maximum and there wasn’t a spare seat to be seen.
Peter Allen, in his capacity as Chair of SCCA, welcomed the guests and went on to announce the establishment of the Frank Lowy Fellowship in recognition of the contribution made by Frank Lowy to the Australian shopping centre industry.
The style of Lowy’s address was an informal interview with the doyen of Australian property journalists, Robert Harley, asking the questions. It was a relaxed and amiable interview with no ‘Hard Talk’ connotations, but then that was the idea: those assembled had come to gain Lowy’s insight on the industry, his view as to what the future held and what he thought were the challenges ahead. He didn’t disappoint.
SCCA industry lunch
As one might easily have guessed, ‘technology’ was the dominant topic. Lowy, early on in the piece, made the point that Australian retailers had not embraced the current technology as much as had their overseas counterparts. In the USA, he said, around 80% of all retail purchases were made with the involvement in some way of a mobile phone with retailers adopting strategies to exploit that phenomenon.
But what was really interesting (to this correspondent at least), was that Lowy’s focus was not on using some technology, whether an object or a program as an aid to making a sale, but rather as a mechanism to connect the consumer with the retailer and the shopping centre manager. To him ‘connectivity’ was the key, a theme to which he would constantly return.
You don’t see Lowy talking very often; it’s a pity because he speaks better than most. He’s relaxed, confident, self assured, and highly knowledgeable, yet simultaneously there’s humility there and he’s not afraid to say he doesn’t know. On several occasions he made the point that as far as technology and shopping centres were concerned, it’s early days and the manual hasn’t yet been written. But he had no doubt about the direction – it was all about collaboration and data sharing.
The future would see a shift in the mindset of shopping centre managers. Today we focus on leasing the shop and then it’s over; according to Lowy, that will change. When a retailer opens a shop, the centre owner/manager will say: “now we start”. The focus will shift to the consumer, he said, and to our ability to communicate with our customers. When a shopper enters the car park, we connect data confidences. We have to convince our retailers that sharing data is productive; we have to prove to them that collaboration improves sales, he said.
One of a few gems scattered by Steven Lowy was an insight into the way he sees the Westfield international portfolio which, in turn, gave an insight into the way he sees Westfield Centres.
In Westfield’s case these huge entities are in major cities in Europe and America and more to the point, they have incredible volumes of people using them; for example, 300,000 a day go through the newly opened New York Trade Center.
It’s a global world and major cities specialise. Westfield Milan is in the heart of the fashion capital of the world; centres in New York and London place Westfield centres at the epicentre of world finance. The San Diego centre is at the heart of the world’s leading technology region and Century City gives Westfield the prime destination at the capital of the Movie and Entertainment world.
How they use these centres, how they use the ‘space’ is what’s important to Lowy. They are constantly taking back leased areas and converting them into far more productive space. According to Lowy, Westfield have taken back space formerly tenanted by 37 department stores and in only one case has it been re-leased to the same usage. Physical space has distinct advantages over cyber space, he says; people numbers prove it!
It was a great lunch with the general consensus being that it ought to be an annual event with a high profile speaker; whoever it is next year will find Steven Lowy a hard act to follow.
