IndiaRetailBiz

Central, a lifestyle destination that offers a wide range of branded merchandise, recently opened its 9th store at Indore, the commercial capital of Madhya Pradesh. The 166,000 sq ft mall located at Naman Mall on RNT Marg in Indore is housing a number of group’s lifestyle formats including Food Bazaar, Celio, Ethnicity, F-123, and e-Zone, among others.

The largest retail format of Kishore Biyani-led Future group is owned by the country’s largest, listed, muti-format, multi-segment, multi-product retailer, Pantaloon Retail (I) Limited. The concept behind this format focuses on offering products of best brands across categories to customers in an unobstructed and a pure environment. Central offers everything that an urban shopper aspires for while shopping. The undelying theme at all Central malls revolves around ”shop, eat and celebrate.”

Founded in May, 2004 at Bangalore, the concept has earned immense popularity among customers at places where the malls are already located. Pantaloon has already set up nine such malls in the past five years, across the eight large cities of country. Apart from Indore, the malls are currently operating at Bangalore, Vadodara, Gurgaon, Hyderabad, Mumbai, Vashi, and Pune (2).

Pantaloon has drawn up big plans for expansion of ‘Central’ malls in the coming six months. The company is expecting to add 9 new ‘Central’ malls by December, 2009. This will increase the tally of this format by 100 per cent from 9 at present to 18 by the end of calendar year. The new malls under implementation will occupy an additional retail space of 1.3 million sq ft.

According to blueprint of expansion, the company will set up the new malls at Mumbai, Ahmedabad, Jaipur, Bangalore, Raipur, Surat, Thane, Nashik, and Vizag. The Central mall at Mumbai will be located at Tardeo in South Mumbai. This mall will occupy over 100,000 sq ft. of space. The retailer is already operating a Central mall in North Mumbai. This mall is located in Oberai Mall at Goregaon (E) area of the city.