Big retailers eye local hypermarkets in sales push
MUMBAI: Large hypermarket chains, including HyperCity, Big Bazaar and Star Bazaar, may soon come to your neighbourhood, but in small formats.
The move aims to boost the retail sector, which has been hit by the global slowdown, and comes at a time many startups are providing hyperlocal services.
Shoppers Stop-owned HyperCity plans to open such stores in cities such as Bangalore, to go closer to customers who may not want to travel far to shop at a super- market for daily groceries.
Future Retail-owned Big Bazaar and Tatas-owned Star Bazaar are also scaling up through small-format stores, an area dominated by about 10 million kirana stores.
HyperCity had restructured its big-box hypermarket business by paring down store sizes from 50,000-100,000 square feet to 30,000. It now sees scope for a neighbourhood format of more compact stores, which will stock groceries, vegetables and fruits, Shoppers Stop MD Govind Shrikhande said. “If express format has to be successful it has to be standalone and not inside a mall, as it’s only a topup format where a customer’s ticket size is lower compared to a monthly shopping cycle.”
Similarly, Future Retail plans to open 4,000 stores across formats such as Nilgiris, Easyday and KB’s Fair Price by 2021. The Kishore Biyani-owned firm acquired the Nilgiris convenience store chain last year, and also merged Future Retail with Bharti Retail, which operates Easyday stores.
Others, including Tata-owned Trent, which runs hypermarkets under the Star Bazaar, is expanding smaller Star Daily. The company plans to add 300-400 stores in the next few years, sources said. Reliance Retail is also expanding its Reliance Fresh stores. It currently has 616 stores, including Reliance Fresh convenience stores and bigger Reliance Marts, across India.
Trent and Reliance Retail executives did not respond to emails.