Aditya Birla Retail plans expansion

Vadodara: Aditya Birla Retail Ltd has announced the setting up of another 12 megastores, following the hypermarket format, in the coming financial year.

Inaugurating the Group's first hypermarket `More' at Vadodara, Kumar Mangalam Birla, chairman of the Aditya Birla Group said the company would take the count of stores in the supermarket format to 500 by the end of 2008.

The first mega store, which spans over a lakh square feet of floor space and hosts around 60,000 products, has been set up within in the premises of the closed textile mill, Padmatex Mill. Adding further, Birla denied that the super and hypermarket formats threaten the existence of the traditional `kirana' stores, the equivalent of 'mom-and-pop' stores of the US, saying that India has ''enough space for all players,'', and the move would create employment.

Russel Berman, CEO, Hypermarket Division, talked about the company's plans to roll out its hypermarkets in Mysore, Ahmedabad, the National Capital Region (NCR) near New Delhi and the across states in South India, while clarifying that there were no plans to follow the franchisee model.