Bharti Retail details ambitious expansion plans

India-based Bharti Retail has announced its plans of becoming a billion dollar company by 2015 and is aiming to open 40 more retail outlets in the next three months. Bharti Enterprises Vice Chairman and Managing Director Rajan Mittal said: "We now have 28 Easyday outlets, including two medium stores, running in the north of India and we shall be adding another 40 or so to make them 70 by December 2009. We are continuing as planned. We want to be a INR1,000 crore (USD207 million) company in the next three years." The group plans to invest up to USD2.5 billion by 2015 in its retail business, occupying 929.368 billion square metres of retail space.

Mittal added: "The slowdown has had only a marginal impact, but there was no change in the company's eight-year plan. The majority of the new stores will be in the small format (280 square metres), five stores will be in the medium format (4,647 square metres), branded as Easyday Market and most of the new ones will be in and around Delhi. About the back-end wholesale business, we had targeted to open two cash and carries, one we have already opened and one we hope to open in December. We will take the first three years as time to learn as we want to do it the correct way. Just opening stores makes no sense. There is lot of other stuff that needs to be handled. We are actually on course." www.planetretail.net