Planet Retail 18 Jun 2008

Speaking at the Reuters Consumer and Retail Summit yesterday, the managing director of Bharti Retail in India, Rajan Bharti Mittal, said that the group's new neighbourhood stores have been received well by Indian consumers and that plans to ramp up its retail presence with Wal-Mart remain on track.

"It's early days for me to predict anything, but if I see the last 60 days, the sales speak that the customers are enjoying the experience. They've (the new stores) been pretty well received ... You'll see more stores every month." Mittal said the roll-out of the new neighbourhood stores would gather pace in the coming months, and the group planned to launch its first medium-sized store later this year, followed by the first hypermarket next year. He declined to give a target for store numbers or a specific timeframe for expansion, but said the group's distribution centre in the Punjab could support 200-300 stores of its three formats and that this could be expanded. "If we chose to expand, we have enough land to do that," he said, adding there was space to triple the size of the current distribution centre. The group expects to open a second distribution centre around the end of next year, Mittal said.

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