Thursday, February 1, 2007

Reliance Retail opens 9 ‘Fresh’ stores in NCR; targets 1 trillion in revenues

Reliance Retail juggernaut moved into National Capital region (NCR) today with the opening of nine ‘Fresh’ stores in Noida, Greater Noida, Gurgaon, Ghaziabad and Faridabad. NCR is one of the economically fastest growing geographical regions of the country. Within the next three months, Reliance wants to take the tally of these ‘Fresh’ stores to 100 in the Delhi- NCR region. Reliance is believed to have invested about Rs. 1,100 crore in this region.

Having launched the first cluster of its ‘Fresh’ stores on 3rd November, 2006, today’s launch takes the pan-India tally of Reliance ’Fresh’ stores to 49, spread across Andhra Pradesh (21), Jaipur (7), Chennai (12), and NCR (9). Three of these stores in Andhra and 12 stores in Chennai were launched during the previous week. Thus, 24 ‘Fresh’ stores have been launched within a short span of one week only.

Reliance expects to launch 1,000 stores before the year end. Occupying an aggregate retail
space of about 1,10,00 square feet, these neighbourhood convenience format stores occupy an average retail space of over 2,200 square feet and offer quality horticulture, grocery and dairy products at competitive prices. Apart from catering to house hold customers, Reliance also makes supplies of these items at wholesale prices to push-cart vendors and small kirana merchants through its wholesale format “Rangers Farm.”

Having already bought 74 nos. land plots for about Rs. 2,000 crore, Reliance has so far invested about Rs. 3,000 crore or about 10% of the first phase planned outlay of Rs. 25, 000 to 30,000 crore on its retail initiative.

According to Reliance Retail, President and CEO (Operations and Strategy), Raghu Pillai, Reliance would open bigger format stores like hypermarkets, supermarkets and speciality stores during the April-June quarter.

Reliance Retail, he said, would earn Rs 1 trillion (Rs. 1 lakh crore) in revenues in the next five years. This excludes additional revenues from the “Rangers Farm” wholesale business operations. Reliance’s experiment with this wholesale format in Hyderabad has been working fine, added Pillai.

Source : Indiaretailbiz

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