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Our Bureau

Pune , March 7

PIRAMYD Retail Ltd, a Piramal group venture, is further broad-basing its presence in the retail segment by launching TruMart, a new brand which will cater to the requirements of Indian families in food, grocery, home and personal care products.

The company will invest Rs 200 crore in rolling out at least 20 TruMart outlets across Pune and Mumbai by March 2006, Mr K. N. Iyer, Director and CEO, Piramyd Retail, told reporters at the launch of the first TruMart store. More are expected to come up in Pune in the next six months. "We have ambitious plans for this segment and are confident of getting a turnover close to Rs 500 crore in the first three years of operations," Mr Iyer said.

To be set up at an estimated cost of Rs 2 crore each, TruMart outlets will seek to address a larger audience than the Piramyd stores which target the upper middle class and offer everything that new-age Indian homes need to run home and hearth. Customers can also pop in daily for freshly baked bread and bakery items at the in-house bakery. Chalking out the plans for the new venture, Mr Iyer said the TruMart brand will also include TruMart Daily, a smaller version of the larger stores which will enable families to `top up' their daily or weekly requirements or impulse buys. The first of the large TruMart stores, a 6,000 sq. ft. outlet, opened here at the upscale Bhandarkar Road . The initial focus of the new business will be on rolling out outlets across Pune and Mumbai, with the latter slated to have at least five outlets in the near term. The first two Mumbai outlets, in Thane and Kandivili, are scheduled to open in April/May this year. "Mumbai city can take at least 100 such stores. Next is Delhi where we are planning a major expansion with a Pyramid Megastore set to open there in August this year," Mr Iyer said. The company plans to convert the existing supermarkets within the Piramyd outlets into TruMarts gradually, he added.

The new venture, interestingly, germinated from a standalone grocery and personal care outlet that Piramyd piloted in Pune's Kalyani Nagar locality last year, according to Iyer. "We made a small cash profit in the first year of operations itself and we noticed a trend in consumer preference where there is a shift away from the supermarket into specialised food, grocery, home and personal care products."

The Pune TruMart, meanwhile, kicked off operations with a bonanza for its customers in the form of TruSmart, a loyalty card programme which will offer them a variety of benefits. Existing customers of Piramyd Retail will also automatically be eligible for the TruSmart card, Mr Bipin Gurnani, SeniorVice-President (Operations), said.

The Piramals are, meanwhile, expanding their presence in the retail segment further and have signed on 12 new Piramyd Retail properties which will come up over the next year. On the anvil are seven new stores in Delhi, one each in Ludhiana, Ahmedabad, Bangalore and Hyderabad and two more in Pune. "The idea is to get to a level of 16 stores in three years," Mr Iyer said.

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