By IANS
Vadodara : Aditya Birla Retail, a member of the Rs.24 billion Aditya Birla group of industries, opened its second hypermarket in Vadodara city of Gujarat Wednesday.
Group chairman Kumarmangalam Birla announced that the company planned to open 12 hypermarkets during 2008-09.
Of these, one will be located at Ahmedabad, where the Reliance group has already set up a hypermarket. A hypermarket each has been planned for the national capital region and Hyderabad. The Aditya Birla group already has stores in Mysore and Pune.
The group’s plan is to invest Rs.100 billion in retail business and open nearly 1,500 supermarket and 100 hypermarket stores in the next five years.
The opening of the hypermarket was in line with Aditya Birla Retail’s strategy of providing multi-shopping formats, a series of conveniently located neighbourhood supermarkets that would stock the daily and weekly household shopping needs and destination hypermarkets that cater to monthly and event- based shopping needs.
The Vadodara mega store, spread over 155,000 square feet, has 60,000 products under its umbrella and is located at Lal Baug in the heart of the city.
Birla estimated the retail segment in India to be worth Rs.300 billion and said the share of the hypermarket in it will be significant.
In January this year, the group acquired Trinethra Super Retail which has given it more than half a million square feet of selling space and a strong presence in the supermarket business in the four southern states of Andhra Pradesh, Karnataka, Tamil Nadu and Kerala.