A branded fish store, anyone? Spencer’s Retail, the retail arm of RPG group company CESC, is likely to roll out standalone niche stores — Spencer’s Gourmet and Spencer’s Fish & Meat — in phases across the country.
These will be smaller in size, at 800-2,000 square feet for Spencer’s Gourmet and around 300 square feet for Spencer’s Fish & Meat.
Spencer’s Gourmet — targeting a niche segment with its cache of high-end cheese, breads, cold cuts and other foreign FMCG items — is currently a shop-in-shop format with three outlets in Kolkata, Gurgaon and Bangalore.
A pilot store of Spencer’s Fish & Meat has been rolled out in Santoshpur, Kolkata and depending on its success plans will be firmed up.
Spencer’s is also focusing on its private labels for increasing the product assortment and enhancing the range.
It plans to tweak the entire assortment to shift 10-12% of its offerings to higher contributing items so that the entire private labels’ share in revenues increases.
Currently, private labels contribute 10-15% of sales revenues.
“The target is to increase it to 25% by March 2010,” Vineet Kapila, president, Spencer’s Retail, told DNA Money.
He said that the company has implemented a cost-rationalisation programme that involved consolidation of operations and rationalisation of manpower apart from closing non-performing stores, which resulted in monthly savings of Rs 10 crore from April 2009.
While Spencer’s clocked a turnover of Rs 1,071 crore in March 2009, it is targeting a growth of 8-10% on this by March 2010.
The retail chain suffered a loss of Rs 220 crore in 2008-09 but Kapila said, “We expect the losses to decline further as we see the benefits of the multi-pronged strategy of reducing losses, selective growth and shift in product mix trickling in. It is more
of a bottomline driven growth.”
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