Liberty Retail opens showroom in Hyd

Company plans to open 25 more outlets in next two years

Liberty Retail Revolutions Limited today opened a new retail showroom, 'Revolutions', in the city. This is the third such store in the country after Mumbai and Chennai.

Announcing this at a press conference, Adarsh Gupta, executive director of Liberty, said the company was planning to open 25 more outlets in the next 18 to 24 months across the country.

It would also open one showroom each in Singapore, Kaula Lumpur, Dhaka, Colombo and Dubai. Apart from shoes, these showrooms will also house a range of leather accessories, sunglasses, watches and artificial jewellery.

The company is investing Rs 20 crore on the Indian showrooms and Rs 5 crore on showrooms abroad. It expects sales worth Rs 3 crore over the next one year in the country.

To meet its production needs, the company plans to set up a new plant at Uttaranchal. This is the first time the company is opening a factory outside Karnal in Haryana. The company plans to invest Rs 5 crore in the first phase of expansion, which would produce about 5,000 shoes a day. Liberty also plans to expand this factory depending on the demand.

Liberty is the fifth largest shoe manufacturing company in the world. Apart from supplying to the domestic market, it also exports to 50 countries around the world. Germany is its biggest market with annual sales worth Rs 25 crore.

The company recorded exports worth Rs 55 crore last year and retail sales in India worth Rs 350 crore in the wholesale market. Liberty's total market share in about 20 per cent (22 per cent in non-leather sector and 35 per cent in the leather sector) in the organised sector.

Liberty is targeting net sales of Rs 250 crore for the current year, a growth of 25 per cent.

Gupta said that the company would revamp the supply chain management and forge closer relations between the company and the customer. He also said that the company was planning to foray into the ceramics industry. A factory would be set up in about four months in Jaipur.

He hoped that the new government at the centre would implement the value-added tax (VAT) as soon as possible. He said, "VAT would reduce the total tax from the present 25 per cent to 15 per cent, which would in turn help reduce the retail prices."