The Hindu Business Line : Trent to expand retail, hypermarket operations

TRENT Ltd, Ms Simone Tata's venture into retailing with the Westside chain after she bid goodbye to Lakme, is set to expand its operations and will add at least two stores to the existing 16 in 2005-06.

The company will also expand the hypermarket business it kicked off in October in Ahmedabad, said Ms Tata, Chairman, Trent Ltd.

At the sidelines of an exhibition on the Tata Group here on Tuesday, Ms Tata said the company is all set to take its hypermarket to Bangalore and Mumbai. "We will make significant investments in growing this business," she said.

Trent Ltd recently forayed into mass market retailing with Star India Bazaar, which sells household items, grocery, food and beverages, health and beauty products and electronic items targeted at the budget buyer through discounted prices.

Ms Tata said the company would launch two more Westside stores by February in Mumbai and Delhi. It also plans to open a store in Vadodara in the next fiscal."It is fun to be in the retailing business when there is so much action happening all around you," Ms Tata said. Ms Tata, who earlier steered the group's Lakme cosmetics business, said she has no plans to return to the beauty business. Shoppers at Westside may soon get to splurge on brands other than the in-house Trent stock. The company recently started stocking a limited selection of outside brands on an `experimental basis' in its Kolkata and Delhi stores to gauge consumer response. Ms Tata said any decision to extend the experiment to other outlets would depend on this response