Mukesh Ambani-led Reliance Retail Ltd plans to open 85 stores of its jewellery retailing business -- Reliance Jewels -- across India over the next three years.
The multi-format retailer, which operates 15 Reliance Jewels outlets, has charted a road-map designed to give a greater focus on metros and larger towns.
"We have a five-year plan for expansion, which drills down to (penetration at) the town level. In the next three-years, we want to have a total of 100 Reliance Jewels stores across the country," Reliance Retail Ltd (RRL), Business head and vice president, Jewellery, Ashok Kaul, told PTI here. He said the company plans setting up stores in cities where it already has a presence.
"We are expanding through saturation, so we will open stores in cities where we already have a presence. We will be adding another eight to ten stores by March 2010 in Mumbai, Bangalore and Hyderabad among other places, for which construction has already begun," Kaul said.
RRL operates jewellery stores in Ahmedabad, Bangalore, Dhanbad, Gurgaon, Hyderabad, Jalandhar, Jamnagar, Jamshedpur, Jodhpur, Ludhiana, Mumbai, New Delhi and Vizag.
While he did not specify the capital expenditure for the roll-out, Kaul said funding requirements are met from internal accruals.The average size of a Reliance Jewels store ranges between 3,000-6,000 sq ft and the company adopts a mix of rented and company-owned stores for expansion.
Kaul said real estate prices have softened in the past one-year due to the economic meltdown, but there was still scope for prices to correct further. However, the opportunity in the Rs1,00,000 crore Indian jewellery market more than made up for the challenges of costly real estate and volatilty in gold prices, he said.
"The size of the opportunity is large. The jewellery market in India is around Rs 1,00,000 crore and branded retailers make up only three to four per cent of this," Kaul said.
Reliance Jewels store offers a wide range of unique designs in gold, diamond and wedding jewellery in Kolkata filigree, Rajkot antique, Junagadh polki, Rajasthani kundan, Amritsari jadau, Hyderabad ruby and emerald collections.
The stores also offer an exclusive range of diamonds and have a separate trousseau room for guests who want to customise their ornaments.
Reliance Retail is an unlisted and wholly-owned subsidiary of oil and gas giant, Reliance Industries Ltd. The fashion-food-gadgets retailer today serves over five million customers in 86 cities across 14 states through nearly 1,000 stores.
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