Reliance, Bharti open hypermarkets in Mumbai

Mukesh Ambani's Reliance Retail and Sunil Mittal's Bharti Retail, which started their operations from opposite geographies, have opened their first hypermarkets in this city.

While Bharti opened its Easyday Hyper yesterday, Reliance made an announcement on its RelianceMart today. For Bharti, this is the first hypermarket it ever opened in the country; for Reliance, the 12th.

Opening operations in 2006, Reliance chose to first open stores in South India before expanding in the east and north. Bharti opened stores from the north and spread its presence in the south and west.

According to property experts, high rentals, limited availability of quality malls, delay in completion of properties and so on in Mumbai kept both the retailers waiting on opening the hypermarkets.

Bharti's hypermarket is spread across 60,000 sq ft and located in the Magnet Mall of Bhandup in Mumbai's eastern suburbs. RelianceMart has an area of 80,000 sq ft at the Acme Mall on SV Road, Santacruz, on the western suburbs.

"We follow a simple strategy. We run 100-odd stores up north. Once we saturate a geography, we enter new areas. After Maharashtra, we go to the south. Instead of opening stores in one go, we go by geography to geography," says Andrew Livermore, chief operating officer, Bharti Retail.

A unit of Bharti Enterprises, it runs 140 Easyday neighborhood stores in Punjab, Haryana, Rajasthan, Uttar Pradesh, Uttarakhand, Madhya Pradesh, Delhi and Jammu and Kashmir. And, 13 'Easyday Market' stores (bigger than super stores but les than the hyper store) in Punjab, Rajasthan, Madhya Pradesh, Chhattisgarh, National Capital Region and Karnataka.

It plans to open 160 Easyday stores and 22 Easyday Markets by the end of 2011. The financial numbers are not available.

An executive with Reliance Retail said the chain planned to open at least two hypers every month. "We are mostly focusing on hypers, as they bring economies of scale in sourcing, supply chain and operations," he adds. Reliance operates 1,000 stores — ‘Reliance Fresh’ neighbourhood stores, supermarkets called ‘Reliance Super’ and a number of speciality formats.

Reliance Hypermart, the hypermart chain of Reliance Retail, made losses of Rs 87 crore in 2010-11. Reliance Retail is expected to take a year or two to make profits.