Future Group, HUL to upgrade warehouses with robotic systems

Mumbai, June 29: Online retailers like Flipkart, Amazon, Jabong and Pepperfry have already automated their warehouses adopting robotic systems. Now it's the turn of Future Group and Hindustan Unilever to upgrade and automate their warehouses.

While these companies do have partly automated warehouses, they are now planning to buy cutting edge technology or robotic systems.

Both Future Group and Hindustan Unilever have six main warehouses, each between 30,000 sq ft to 50,000 sq ft. Yaduvendra Singh, global head and vice president, Grey Orange said, depending on the technology the companies adopt, automating a warehouse requires somewhere between R5 crore to R15 crore.

Rakesh Biyani, director, Future Group said, “We have already automated our warehouses around 3 years back and we continue to adopt new technologies and plan to invest around R60 to R100 crore in 2016-17”.

A HUL spokesperson said, “As a policy we do not comment on market speculation and hence have no specific comments to offer.”

A senior official from Future Group told FE, “We are making significant investments for automation of our warehouse in Nagpur and other locations. We import most of the technology.”

Online retailers like Flipkart, Jabong, Pepperfry, and logistics and delivery companies like Tra-mex , DT-DC , Delhivery, Ekart, Gojavas, Mahindra, Kerry Logistics among others have adopted robotic systems or automated their warehouses. Several FMCG players and offline retailers are in the process of automating their warehouses.

Future Group and HUL have six main warehouses