The Hindu Business Line : Rapid rollout planned for Reliance Hyper

Chennai, Feb. 22 With four hypermarkets under its belt so far, Reliance Retail plans a superfast rollout of these large-format stores over the next few months and expects to have at least 30 hypermarkets, under two brands, Reliance Mart and Super, up and running by this June. At least 20 of these will be large stores covering 50,000 sq ft of space.

Reliance opened its first mart, spread over 1.65 lakh sq ft, in Ahmedabad last August and followed it up with a 80,000 sq. ft store in Jamnagar with smaller ones in Amritsar and Gurgaon. According to a senior official of the retail major, the group will invest Rs 200 crore in the fit-out of these stores and expects to have one million sq ft of retail space under the hypermarket format.

This does not include its forays in several other formats, ranging from Fresh and Digital to speciality stores such as Footprint, Trends and Time Out.

According to sources, properties have already been finalised and the group is now racing to fit the stores out to allow a rapid rollout. Several of these new stores will come up in Gujarat, where Reliance had taken over the Adani group’s retail chain.

20 more on the anvil

Large stores are also planned across the country, from Mumbai and Bangalore to Kerala.

After the June deadline, 20 more are on the anvil between June and December this year.

The hypermarkets are all on the value-for-money retail plank, selling everything from apparel to durables, though not the premium-priced ones. Reliance Mart and Super employ around 1,500 people now and will scale up to 3,500 in a few months.

With at least six to seven different formats in play now under the Reliance brand: Fresh, Digital, Trends, TimeOut, Footprints, Jewellery and Mart, sources say that each of them have emerged large enough to merit a level of independence.

From a centralised leadership model that Reliance Retail was following earlier, the group has now moved to a “distributed leadership” model where each CEO or group head is responsible and accountable for everything — from sourcing and recruitment, identifying properties and ensuring profitability. In short, each of them will run it as they would a separate company, say sources.

People focus

The realisation, they say, is that retail is a business that has to be approached differently, with more of a people focus than as a project which needs to be completed on time.

Fresh is headed by Mr Gunender Kapoor, Digital by Mr Ajay Baijal, Trends by Mr Arun Sirideshmukh, Footprints, Mr G. Shanker, TimeOut and Jewellery by Mr Bijou Kurian and Mart by Mr K. Radhakrishnan.

A new format that has also got going is auto, headed by Mr Arun Dey.

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