Aditya Birla Retail is looking to increase its total number of supermarkets in the country to 500 by March, Sumant Sinha, CEO, Aditya Birla Retail said. "From the current 350 we will be scaling up our supermarkets to 500 by March 2008," he said, while announcing the re-branding of Fabmall grocery supermarkets to 'more'.
Aditya Birla Retail on Thursday said its sales, even in Pune, have not been impacted by the spreading disease swine flu.
Last year, Trent had entered into a tie-up with The Xander Group wherein Xander was to invest in malls along with local developers and Trent was to be the anchor tenant. Currently, three-to-four such malls are being developed in cities such as Surat and Ahmedabad.
Aditya Birla Retail Limited (ABRL), the retail arm of the Aditya Birla Group, would be investing Rs 8,000 to Rs 10,000 crore (Rs 80-100 billion) in expanding its operations across the country over a period of five years.
AV Birla Group chairman, Kumar Mangalam Birla and the chief executive officer of Aditya Birla Retail, Sumant Sinha bare the details, in this open-ended conversation, about their plans for Aditya Birla Retail.
Competition from kirana stores, low margins and property and supply chain issues delay break-even.
Like other food and grocery chains, Birla Retail is aggressively pushing its private labels and large packs to woo customers. Besides offering value, private labels push retailers' margins.
Some of the domestic biggies like Future Group, Reliance Retail and Aditya Birla Retail, while welcoming the government's move to allow 51 per cent FDI in multi-brand retail and completely open single-brand retail, said it will take time for foreign rivals to make presence felt on their own in the Indian retail landscape.
Raheja-owned retailer Shoppers Stop has gone off the beaten track. At a time, when bigger players such as Pantaloon and Aditya Birla Retail are either shutting stores or looking at halting expansion to preserve cash and check losses, Shoppers Stop is moving ahead with its expansion plans.
By his own admission, the last 30 months have been one of the toughest in Thomas Varghese's 29-year career. The 50-year-old chief executive of Aditya Birla Retail, however, quickly adds that they have been 'very interesting and challenging too'.
Retail players are planning to expand but with caution. It seems the slowdown of 2008-09 is still weighing on their minds.
Though private labels comprise 10 to 12 per cent of the overall FMCG volumes, analysts said they were recording double-digit growth annually and could pose problems for the big players in the near future.
While some like RPG's Spencer's and Wadhawan group's Spinach say it will encourage them to invest more in cold chains, others such as Aditya Birla Retail and Future Group said the announcement has come too late and helps fresh produce and chilled product suppliers more than retailers.
With confidence creeping back into the market place and rentals down up to 50 per cent, large retailers are back to drawing up aggressive growth plans. In the next one year, Aditya Birla Retail, Bharti Enterprises, Reliance Retail, Trent, Mahindra Retail and others hope to open new stores spread over five million square feet.
Fitch, one of the largest design consultancies in the world that has designed stores of Wal-Mart, Target, Marks & Spencer, Best Buy and Tesco among others, is betting big on India's organised retail sector. Already in the country to serve clients such as Aditya Birla Retail, Reliance Retail, Tatas and so on, Fitch plans to treble the number of staff and open new offices in the country.
An interview with Andrew Denby, who took over as the CEO, Supermarkets, of the Aditya Birla Retail Ltd six months ago. Before joining the Aditya Birla group, he had worked for retail majors like Marks & Spencer, Dairy Farm, A S Watson, etc.
Sumant Sinha, CEO, Aditya Birla Retail, says that Trinethra's doing well, but he's worried about high real estate prices.
The retailer, which runs a supermarket chain under the More brand, is targeting annual sales of $4.5 billion (Rs 22,000 crore or Rs 220 billion) by March 2014 from Rs 1,200 crore (Rs 12 billion) in the current financial year. The retailer clocked sales of Rs 500 in the previous year. In 2007, the company had talked about a Rs 9,000 crore (Rs 90 billion) investment plan.
Sources said the company would rope in private equity players in the next round of financing within a year. After reaching a particular scale, the company would also come out with an initial public offer, they added.
Radhakishan S Damani, investor and promoter of the D-Mart supermarket chain, has broken into the elite club of the top 100 global billionaires. Damani, who grew up in a single-room apartment in Mumbai, is now ranked 98th on the Bloomberg Billionaires Index with $19.2 billion as his net worth. The index is a daily ranking of the world's richest people. The other Indians on the top 100 rich list ahead of Damani are Mukesh Ambani, Gautam Adani, Azim Premji, Shiv Nadar, and Lakshmi Mittal.
The latest trigger has been Future group's buyout talk with the retail unit of Andhra Pradesh Chief Minister Chandrababu Naidu's family-owned Heritage Foods
Did top Indian business groups miss the e-commerce opportunity by focusing on replicating the Walmart model instead of following the Amazon model of online shopping?
"Everything we consume, we have to consume responsibly," the textile minister said at Lakme Fashion Week.
While the investment amount could not be immediately ascertained, a report pegged it at about $2 billion.
'Unlike Big Bazaar, where the promoter calls the shot, in ABRL, professionals take decisions. So, every new CEO leads to a change in strategy, which confuses vendors and the team.'
Big chains such as Star Bazaar, Future Group and D Mart have set up separate shelves to sell products of Patanjali.
Amazon has also signed a term sheet with Kishore Biyani-led Future group to invest $600 million to $700 million for a 12 to 15 per cent stake in the retail giant, it is learnt.
The Aditya Birla Group mayrestructure plan to bring all its retail verticals under Pantaloon Fashion & Retail.
Navil Noronha stepped out of the shadows to address the media for the first time during the company's recent IPO.
Bharti Retail will issue one equity share of Rs 2 each for every share of Rs 2 held in Future Retail
Aditya Birla Retail set up seven years earlier, posted a 20% growth in sales over a year earlier for 2013-14.
Asking the government to tweak FDI norms in multi-brand segment, retailers said sourcing rules must be made similar to that of single brand while demanding foreign firms be allowed to put only 50 per cent of first tranche of investment in back-end infrastructure.
The central government has said it will look into the matter.
Sarvesh Agrawal tells Shobha Warrier about how he built a start-up "of the interns, by the interns and for the interns."
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