Reliance Retail says no threat to petty traders

Hyderabad: Reliance Industries today reassured petty retail traders that its newly launched retail business posed no threat to them as it inaugurated 10 more of its grocery, fruit and vegetable Reliance Fresh outlets.

The launch of the new stores also provided an opportunity to smaller neighbourhood stores and even push cart sellers to source supplies at competitive rates making it a win-win situation.

Raghu Pillai, president and CEO, (Operations and Strategy) RIL, said, "Kirana stores and push cart sellers will benefit from us. The argument that they will be affected is not supported by numbers," at the inauguration of Reliance Fresh retail outlet in Hyderabad's upmarket Banjara Hills.

Reliance Fresh stores will also serve as the front-end of RIL's much larger agriculture initiative involving the setting up of sourcing centers for farm product, supply chain and finally retailing.

The neighbourhood format has been designed keeping in mind the daily requirements of neighbouring households and stocked with a wide variety of competitively priced daily consumption products like vegetables, fruits, eggs, dairy products and groceries and, Pillai said.

"We are not harming small retail players... The market is growing by 8 per cent, which is $24-$25 billion dollars (nearly Rs112,500 crore) every year... We are aiming at revenues of only 25 billion dollars in four years... Even if the market grows by 100 billion dollars by 2015, organised retail would be still less than 10-12 per cent of retail trade," he said.