The Mukesh Ambani-led Reliance Retail plans to open as many as 45 books and music stores under the brand name of Reliance TimeOut, over the next five years.
The multi-format retailer, which operates seven stores of TimeOut now, said it wants to tap the Rs 3,500-crore book retailing industry, of which only 40 per cent is organised at present.
"In the next three to five years, we will have a total of 45 TimeOut outlets across four states - mainly in Western and Southern regions. Our strategy is to first saturate a town, then a state followed by the entire region," Reliance Retail Business Head for Reliance TimeOut Deepinder Kapany told PTI here today, adding within the next couple of months five stores will be opened in Mumbai alone.
"The next few stores in 2010 will come up in Delhi, Ahmedabad, Mumbai and Bangalore. We want to saturate Gujarat, Maharashtra, Karnataka and the National Capital Region first," Kapany said.
This is part of an overall aggressive expansion strategy by the format, which will enter Pune, Nagpur, Hyderabad, Mysore, Mangalore, Ahmedabad, Baroda and Jamnagar.
Reliance Retail will expand through cost-effective model of revenue-sharing format with property owners.
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Kapany claimed that the TimeOut format is the "biggest beneficiary" of the economic meltdown of the past year as books, music and stationary continued their sales momentum even as most lifestyle and value retailers world over grappled with depressed sales.
"This is one format which has grown. On an average day, we had footfalls of at least 4,000 to 4,500 in our Delhi and Bangalore stores respectively. Our same store sales growth has been 26 per cent this year," he said, but declined to reveal figures.
Kapany said TimeOut reserves 40 per cent of its shelf space for books, 20 per cent for music and 10 per cent for toys and games. The remaining 30 per cent space is equally divided between stationary items and gifts, watches and fragrances.
Reliance Retail last week opened a 10,000-sqft TimeOut store in Mumbai and it already operates a 42,000 sqft store in Gurgaon and another 21,000 sqft store in Bangalore.