IndiaRetailBiz

Aditya Birla Retail (ABRL), a retailing arm of Kumar Mangalam Birla group, which recorded a whopping growth in turnover of 110 percent in FY 2008-09, is well on its way to achieve further growth in sales turnover of 40 to 45 per cent this fiscal (2009-10).

ABRL, which currently operates a retail chain of around 650 food and grocery supermarket format and hypermarket format stores under the brand name of ‘More for You,’ according to Thomas Varghese CEO, achieved sales of nearly Rs 1,150 crore during the financial year ending 31st March, 2009 (2008-09) against previous year’s turnover of around Rs 550 crore, is expecting to garner sales volume of about Rs 1,700 crore this fiscal ending 31st March, 2010 (2009-10).

Buoyed by the growth, most of which has come from expansion of the retail network, the company is looking at taking the tally of stores to 720 to 730 stores by adding 60 to 70 stores (80 new stores less 10 t0 20 stores under shut down) during the current financial year ending 31st March, 2010. The company’s focus this year is on opening Hypermarket stores. Against teo hypermarket format stores being currently operated by the company at Mysore and Vadodara, plans are afoot to add 6 to 8 new hypermarket stores of 65,000 to 70,000 sq ft size each, this fiscal. Four of these are expected to be unveiled at Aurangabad, Indore, Mumbai and Bangalore by September, 2009.

Having opened a total of 710 stores in the first 20 months of commencement of business, including the stores of Hyderabad-based retail chain ‘Trinethra’ that was earlier acquired by the group, ABRL in a massive exercise of restructuring operations closed down 76 under-performing stores in the last six months. The company is preparing to also close down a few more stores, numbering between 10 and 20, in the next few months.

“That was part of my cleaning up operation. The last six to eight months have been a wake-up call for the industry. We are going to focus on consolidation this year,” said Verghese while talking about closing of stores to PTI.