EIH Ltd, the Oberoi Group flagship and owners of Oberoi Hotels and Resorts, Trident and Maidens, is eyeing the possibility of scaling up its recently launched patisserie cafe, ‘Cou Cou’.

The standalone cafe targets a segment of customers that the company would like to venture into going forward – and this includes the next-gen luxury, premium millennials, luxury loyalists, the modern executives, among others, the company management said in a recent analyst concall.

According to Vikram Oberoi, MD and CEO, EIH Ltd, the cafe “has potential” and the exercise on finding suitable locations “for growth” has been done. However, the company would first like to “wait and see” how the existing store performs before expansion takes place.

“…and it would be premature for me to give you a number because this isn’t available in the public domain, but to answer your question we would like to scale this and we would like to do it well. Just to give you a perspective, cafes, I just googled Starbucks for example, Starbucks, I think last I looked was in 170 locations across the country, so there is an opportunity and we won’t be a Starbuck, let me also clarify that but there is potential to scale Cou Cou,” Oberoi added.

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EIH Ltd – which owns and manages 33 premium and luxury hotels and resorts covering 4,512 keys across 7 countries – set up the first outlet (of the cafe) at the Jio World Drive at Bandra Kurla on October 7.

Tapping other opportunities

According to Oberoi, apart from scaling up the cafe, the company is also looking at “some other opportunities” that are “even shorter-term initiatives that will drive top-line and bottom-line performance”.

For H1 FY22, EIH Ltd reported a consolidated total revenue of ₹358.5 crore (up 177 per cent y-o-y) while the losses came down to ₹151.7 crore (from ₹270.9 crore in the year-ago period). In India, it owns and manages 1,591 keys under the Oberoi Brand and 2,172 keys under Trident. It owns and manages another 749 keys under the Oberoi Brand, in the rest of the world across countries like Egypt, Bali, etc.

“We are looking at other things as well, but unfortunately can’t comment at this point and one of the things that I may want to just add to that is Oberoi Select (its subscription-based loyalty program) just looks at a slightly different approach to selling room… But to say are we looking at new sources of business and revenue and new models. It is premature to comment on that,” he added.

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