Business Daily from THE HINDU group of publications
Thursday, Mar 08, 2007
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Business Daily from THE HINDU group of publications Thursday, Mar 08, 2007 ePaper |
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Marketing
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Retailing
R. Ravikumar
Reliance Retail is also planning to set up learning centres across the country to train people in modern retail.
"We are also planning to expand our Reliance Fresh chain to other cities such as Madurai and Coimbatore in Tamil Nadu," he told Business Line. The company now has over a dozen Reliance Fresh outlets at various locations in Chennai. These stores, at an average size of 2,000 sq.ft each, see over 12,000 footfalls a day. It has also put in place around 10 collections centres and one centre for grading and other processing (such as ripening) facilities to cater to these outlets. Referring to protests by some vegetable and fruit vendors at Koyambedu (a wholesale market in Chennai) and a political party as insignificant, Mr Balachandran said, "The size of Chennai's vegetable and fruit market is Rs 18 crore a day. With a turnover of Rs 12 lakh a day, Reliance Fresh stores can never be a threat to those wholesalers." The Reliance Fresh chain, operated as a company-owned-and-franchisee-operated model, is not the company's main agenda. "Our prime focus is to open big-format stores. Reliance Fresh is just a pilot project. This is more to understand the business," he said. Reliance is all set to retail non-vegetarian food items too shortly. "We have identified three stores in Chennai to sell meat and poultry products," Mr Balachandran said. Asked whether the company will introduce any in-house meat brand, he said the outlets would initially sell other branded items till the company puts in place its own abattoir and other facilities. Commenting on the availability of trained manpower for the retail industry, the company's Vice-President (Human Resources), Mr B. Venkataramana, said trained manpower is always in short supply. "For our stores, we take people from in and around the locality where we have outlets and give them 10- to 12-day on-the-job training in standard operating procedures and customer orientation and then employ them," he said. According to him, so far the chain has employed 900 directly and over 500 indirectly. "However, we might require around 20,000 people for Tamil Nadu alone by 2010," he said. As there is great demand for trained manpower in the retail industry, Reliance Retail is also planning to set up learning centres across the country to train people in modern retail. "We are planning to set up at least one learning centre in every State," said Mr Venkataramana. Reliance Retail, apart from developing employability skills of people to get them industry-ready through these learning centres, will also employ some of them in its own retail chain. "This exercise is not meant to be a captive one. The students trained in these centres can also opt to join other retail entities," he said.
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