Aditya Birla Retail to focus on smaller towns

Aditya Birla Retail Limited is focusing on expansion of retail store network in semi-urban and rural areas on the back of its experience in smaller towns.

It found the advantage of being a big store located among many smaller kirana and departmental stores operating in these smaller towns helped by the changing shopping habits and surplus money among the customers, according to Sumit Chandana, vice president-FMCG and PL of Aditya Birla Retail.

About 200 of the over 540 retail stores of the company are located in Tier-III and Tier-IV towns with population as low as 35,000. These are doing well as customers are no more keen on the price tag and willing to try new products in an air-conditioned environment, he said.

Even if the company sets up a relatively smaller store compared to the size of a bigger city retail outlet, it is still bigger and attract the attention of customers, Sumit told the students of Indian School of Business at panel discussion on retail innovation on Saturday.

According to him, the retail players are now focussing on improving efficiencies rather than simple expansion that happened in the last decade.

Even after bringing in new strategies and expanding the reach to get more customers into the fold of modern trade, the organised retail space would be around 20 per cent in the next 3 years, said V Ganesh Head of New Geographies and Direct Trade of Colgate-Palmolive (India) Limited.

Being sensible to customers' shopping behaviour and choices always help enhance business though the analytical data on how these behavioral patterns can be translated into more business is still not adequately available, according to the other speakers at the event.