Reliance Retail to open 60 iStores

Reliance Retail Limited plans to open around 60 iStores, an exclusive Apple products reseller format, in the next 18 months, besides expanding its multi-branded consumer electronics, home appliances, IT and telecommunications products retail chain, Reliance Digital, by another 150 in two to three years.

Inaugurating its second iStore in the country at Hyderabad, after Bangalore, Ajay Baijal, president and chief executive (consumer durables, IT and telecom), Reliance Retail, said the company would scale up the number of iStores to 20 by this fiscal end, eventually touching the 60-store mark in the next 18 months.

The iStores, designed as per the specifications given by Apple to sell the latter's iMac desktop computers, MacBook notebooks, Mac Pro and MacBook Pro, iPods and the entire suite of Mac software along with over 500 accessories and peripherals complementing Apple products, would be first to introduce the iPhone in India, he added.

iPhone, at present, is available in Europe and the US, and Apple is yet to launch the product in Asia.

Typically covering a carpet area of between 2,000 sft and 3,000 sft, each iStore would involve an investment of around Rs 2,500 per sft. The company expects to do a business of Rs 50,000 per sft a year.

"We aim to garner revenues to the tune of $5 billion (around Rs 20,000 crore) from Reliance Digital by 2012," Baijal said.