Big C Mobiles charts Rs 50-crore spread

Big C Mobiles Private Limited, a Hyderabad-based mobile retail chain, has embarked on an expansion, which will entail an investment of about Rs 50 crore over the next one year.

The six-year-old company, touted as the second largest south Indian mobile retail chain next to Chennai-based UniverCell that has 180 stores, plans to increase its number of stores to 200 by March 2010. Big C currently has 54 outlets – 50 in Andhra Pradesh and four in Bangalore.

“We are targeting to take our total store network to 100 in Andhra Pradesh and Karnataka by March 2009. The second phase of expansion will see our foray into Kerala and Tamil Nadu markets in 2010, with our network touching the 200-store bar by then,” M Balu Chowdary, chairman of Big C Mobiles, told Business Standard.

Mobile retailing, including handsets and accessories, is currently a Rs 75,000-crore market in India, of which the organised sector comprises about 30 per cent. The organised sector, which is growing at 10-12 per cent year-on-year, is expected to grow at a fast clip of 50 per cent in the next three years, he said. “With the mobile users in the country expected to touch 500 million by 2010 with additions of about 9 million subscribers every month, there is a huge opportunity for mobile retailing,” he added.

Chowdary said the company was eyeing tier-I and tier-II cities such as Mysore, Hubli, Mangalore, Coimbatore, Thiruvananthapuram, Madurai and Salem, where music-enabled and FM phones are moving faster, for its second phase of expansion with each store having a carpet area of between 450 sft and 2,200 sft.

“We plan to fund the expansion through a mix of debt and internal accruals,” Chowdary said, adding the company was in the processing of developing an online mobile store, which will be launched within a month.

Big C registered revenues of Rs 180 crore in the last financial year. It expects to close the current fiscal with revenues of between Rs 250 crore and Rs 275 crore on the back of its expansion.