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ve their business strategies by carrying more SKU's (stock-keeping units) and embracing the self-service format (Sengupta, 2008). The number of shopping malls and retail chains has also been steadily increasing as large retailers, like Pantaloon and Shopper's Stop, are improving their supply chains and increasing their spread geographically. Smaller retailers are organizing themselves by adding or acquiring branded merchandise to their stock franchises of popular foreign brands. As they have a greater knowledge of the domestic market, they have a competitive edge over the incoming foreign retailers.

Gavirneni et al. (1999) considered a problem where the supplier with limited capacity replenished a retailer. Two inventory policies that required centralized demand information namely the echelon-stock policy and the installation-stock policy were compared. It was proved that information sharing reduces the supplier's cost provided the retailer adopted a unique ordering policy thereby further reducing the supply-chain cost. Lee et al. (2000) considered a supply chain consisting of a manufacturer and a retailer, where demands at the retailer are generated as an auto correlated process. Information sharing allowed the manufacturer understands the real-time demands at the retailer. Here too the cost savings from information sharing can be significant, particularly when the demand is non stationary. Zhu and Thonemann (January-February 2004)

The research study on the pros and cons for FDI into India and China showed that the advantages for India included a huge market with fast developing economy, and diversified resource availability. IT revolution increasing improvement of infrastructure and fairly good investment protection were the positive points that favored investments into India. There were drawbacks like a big section of people who are in the poor and middle class, power shortage, bureaucracy, and ethnic diversifications that hampered FDI inflows into India. China too had positive areas of growth and resource availability with immense development in relevant infrastructure however the drawbacks for the Chinese market was hindrances in free flow of information, regulatory burden and lack of appropriate English literacy - (Tarun Kanti May2012)

Looking at the history of the global retail giant Wal-Mart it is noticed that they entered China as Sam's club with more than 70 branches all over the huge country. Based on their diversification and expansion strategy Wal-mart in 1994 uses China as a local base thus find it easy to serve the markets close by. They were assisted by the good policies of the Chinese government that boosted up their FDI inflows. While the population the total population in China is 19.4% compared to the US (4% of world population) they could counter the intense competition in the domestic US market. (Bianco & Zellner, 2003; Biddle, 2004; Molin, 2004; Rock, 2001 ; Wahnart, 2010)

Even though there were problems of cultural differences and the varied perceptions of the Chinese people Wal-Mart's business in China has been remarkable and praiseworthy (Bianco & Zellner, 2003; Biddle, 2004; Molin, 2004; Rock, 2001 ; Walmart, 2010).

India too is considered and important place for foreign investors in spite of bureaucratic problems. India could not attract FDI's as China however the picture is changing as

India will potentially be the