IndiaRetailBiz

“Apple is one of the iconic bands and offers most innovative products. We are the first company to offer these products in retail.”– Ajay Baijal, President and CEO (consumer durables, IT and Telecom), Reliance Retail.

Reliance Retail, a wholly owned subsidiary of Mukesh Ambani owned Reliance Industies, is looking at garnering 15% share of consumer durables and personal IT products market worth Rs. 70,000 crore (equivalent to about Rs. 10,000 crore), through a chain of digital retail stores.

Reliance Digital, which currently operates three digital-cum-durables stores in Ghaziabad (NCR), Bangalore, and Mumbai, has plans to set up 200 ‘Digital’ stores, in the next three years. These stores will occupy three million sq ft space and garner 10% of turnover of all Reliance retail chains. Besides offering a wide range of consumer durable and digital products, Reliance will also offer dedicated ‘after sales service’ and troubleshooting ‘in-house’ service arm called ResQ.

Sixty of the planned 200 ‘Digital’ stores to be set up in top 20 cities in 18 months will be ‘iStores,’ which will offer Apple products, including iMac consumer desktop computers, MacBook consumer notebooks, Mac Pro and MacBook Pro, iPods and the entire suite of Mac software together with over 500 accessories and peripherals. ‘iStores’ will also offer specific training modules for different Mac applications through regular training modules. 20 of these stores are likely to be unveiled this year itself.

This was revealed by Ajay Baijal, President and CEO (consumer durables, IT and Telecom), Reliance Retail, on the occasion of the launch of the country’s first ‘exclusive’ iStore located at Ashoka Metropolitan Mall, in Banjara Hill area of Hyderabad. The ‘iStore’ spread over an area of 2,875 sq ft was opened on 7th March, 2008. This will be the only referral store of Apple products in the country.