The Aditya Birla Group on Friday unveiled its retail brand, ‘More’, which will see an investment of Rs 9,000 crore. The brand will have no tie-ups.
MUMBAI: The Aditya Birla Group on Friday unveiled its retail brand, ‘More’, which will see an investment of Rs 9,000 crore.
The group, which has already kick-started the retail foray by acquiring the Trinethra supermarket chain in South India in January 2007, now plans to launch new stores under More. Under More, Aditya Birla Retail will have two retail formats - supermarkets and hypermarkets.
Announcing the brand name in Mumbai, Aditya Birla Group chairman Kumar Mangalam Birla said, “Our intention is to change the way people shop by offering them more than what is available in the organised retail industry today. Unveiling of the brand ‘More’ is our first step in this direction.”
The company will roll out the supermarket format first, from June 2007, with over dozen-odd across Pune. But Aditya Birla Retail is still in the fine-tuning stage with one small store in south India, as far as the hypermarket is concerned.
“It’s too early to give a time-frame for lunching the hypermarket format. I think we are still in the process of finalising it and the precise details will be made public at a later stage. The idea is to eventually have a pan-India presence with the supermarket and hypermarket formats,” said Sumant Sinha, CEO, Aditya Birla Retail.
And Aditya Birla Retail will go it alone. “We have the necessary competencies within the group and, hence, see no reason for partnering with any foreign company,” said Birla.
Birla made it clear that the investment of Rs 9,000-odd crore in the retail venture will not be out of any of the listed companies in the Aditya Birla Group. He, however, refrained from divulging the funding details, saying “it had no relevance to the customer”.
“We will look at raising funds through debt and equity. Besides, the country’s capital market is vibrant enough to raise funds. However, we haven’t finalised on any of the options at this stage,” said Birla.
The company intends to re brand the 200-odd Trinethra stores in south India in order to provide consistent shopping experience across all its outlets. “The re-branding from Trinethra to More will be completed this financial year. This apart, we will aggressively expand our presence in the southern region with the new format,” he said.
The supermarket division will be headed by Andrew Denby and the hypermarkets division by Russel Berman.
The supermarkets will be spread across 10,000 sq ft while the hypermarkets will have a floor space of 75,000 sq ft. The overall roll-out plan for the supermarkets is over 1,000 stores, though there is no specific number being assigned for the hypermarket format.
“We will play by the year on the hypermarket format,” said Sinha.
The company intends to hire around 10,000 people in the next 12 months. It has also started designing the supply chain to connect households more directly to farmers and envisages considerable investments in back-end infrastructure as well. Sourcing directly from farmers is also being pursued aggressively.
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