By IANS,
New Delhi : As part of its revival plans, footwear major Bata India Limited Thursday opened its largest store in the national capital region with a floor area of 4,400 square feet, at a cost of Rs.50 lakh.
“It’s our plan to open large stores which would have our flagship Bata brand as well as other brands like Power, Reebok and Hush Puppies,” Marcelo Villagran, managing director, Bata India Limited, told IANS at the launch of the store at Indrapuram in Ghaziabad.
According to him, the revival of the largest footwear retailer would now depend on larger stores in tier-I and II cities where he said the company was witnessing enormous growth.
“We are witnessing growth from these cities and in the future we will open more stores in these cities,” Villagran said.
He said that the new format of the Bata stores would redefine shoe market retailing in the country, as there would be more brands, designs and spacious settings for the customers.
“This model will have large Bata stores, which will be larger than 4,000 square feet to allow enough space to present large variety of footwear,” he said.
The Switzerland-headquartered company has opened 82 new stores across the country in 2010 and plans to open as many in the next year.
“In a fast growth country such as India, people now want to buy better shoes with good design and brand name,” said Villagran who has been associated with the company for the last 40 years.
“We sell over 45 million shoes per year, and I expect the number to go up in the coming year,” Villagran said while not revealing any expansion plans.
According to a senior executive in the company, the aggressive expansion transformed the company’s ubiquitous brand name, which had got dented a bit in the past couple of years.
“Even in places like Ujjain, Dhanbad, Nagpur, Hubli and Patiala you can see good growth. They want to buy, but they don’t have any store near them,” the senior executive said.
He said consumers were travelling from western Uttar Pradesh and other areas of north India to Delhi for buying Bata products as they were not available in their cities. This is the reason for the company to invest in expanding its store network.
On the growth front, the company expects a stable rise in the segment to continue with a year-on-year gain of 15 percent.
“We will grow in a very normal way like in the past with a growth of 15 percent. This growth is normal for us as this is a growing economy,” Villagran said.
Sporting Bata’s premium Hush Puppies shoes, Villagran, who has been wearing Bata shoes since his school days, said that the objective of his new format was to make shoe shopping a pleasurable affair for consumers.