The Murguppa group's rural retail business, which has “more shelf space than Pantaloon”, is being given a booster shot. Coromondel International, the group's flagship company that runs these agri-retail stores, is on an expansion drive and plans to scale up from 700 outlets now to 1,000.
Today, these stores (branded as Mana Gromor Centre in Andhra Pradesh and Namma Gromor Centre in Karnataka) sell all the agriculture inputs that a farmer would need (including financial products), and fetch the group sales of Rs 1,300 crore. The group intends launching outlets in Tamil Nadu and Maharashtra.
Retail store format
A year back, the group nurtured ambitions of selling lifestyle products – from apparel to cycles – but that did not quite take off. Nevertheless, the group has found that the retail store format works well when it comes to sell agriculture inputs and hence the thrust to the business, said Mr A Vellayan, Chairman of the group, in an interview with
What began as centres for soil testing and farmer education has today grown into outlets that sell fertilisers, pesticides, seeds, micronutrients, sulphur, boron, zinc, farm mechanisation services, crop and weather insurance. They have now also started selling organic manure and cattle feed.
Most stores span an area of 2,500 sq ft, while some stretch to even 5,000 sq ft. Each store has about 5,000 farmer members, who have been given kisan cards loaded with some amount of money, part of that has to be spent in the store, while the rest can be spent elsewhere.
“We want our rural retail stores to have everything that is input for the farmer,” says Mr Vellayan. There is a vested interest in this, he adds. “We are helping the farmer mechanise and become more productive – as this will help us sell more.”