Cafe Coffee Day plans overseas outlet

The Rs 300 crore Amalgamated Bean Coffee Trading Company has embarked on a major expansion plan involving a total investment of Rs 18-25 crore of its CCD (Cafe Coffee Day) outlets with 100 more to be established including 50 abroad, giving the enterprise a global profile.

"We intend to open 50 new CCD outlets in the country this year and have plans to venture abroad with 50 more, the first of which is expected to get started in June", Cafe Coffee Day head, marketing, Sudipta Sen Gupta told PTI here.

She said depending on the locale, a cafe will involve an investment of anywhere between Rs 18-25 lakhs which the company will fund through internal accruals.

If everything goes well, the first of the 50 planned CCD cafes abroad will open next month she said adding names of the locals had not been disclosed as due diligence had been on to zero in on the proposed cities.

She said the investment in cafes abroad will be around the same as in the ones in India or even less since the rental was much higher in cities like Mumbai and Delhi.

Rent of the premises ranged between 8-15 per cent of the total investment in a coffee cafe, she added.

Sen Gupta said of the CCD 50 cafes expected to open in India this year, 25 were in north India including 11 in the NCR (National Capital Region).

"We already have a very strong presence in the south and are now focusing on north India", she said adding even though CCD is eyeing a global profile, has ventured into concepts like music and book cafes and is by far the largest coffee-cafe chain in the country.

Sen Gupta said the company was embarking on expansion through internal resources and had returned the loan it had taken from the AIG a couple of years back.

Cafe coffee day opened its 150th outlet here this week incorporating a bookshop within and intends to take the number of book-cum-coffee outlets to 25 by 2005 and 100 by 2007 from 10 at present.

It has entered into a strategic tie-up with ebd book cafe to ensure leisurely browsing and purchase of books over a cup of coffee.

While the revenue earned from sale of books will go to ebd book cafe, the rest will accrue to ccd which is also the investor in the premises for the outlet.

CCD already has nine such book-cum-coffee outlets including ones in ludhiana, patiala and delhi and planned to open 15 more in one year at ahmedabad, bhopal, gurgaon, hyderabad, jodhpur, madurai, bombay and udaipur.

Sen gupta said ccd saw a lot of potential in such specialised cafes such as 'garden', 'fashion', 'sport' and 'music' and was keeping its options open to experiment with such concepts.

Many of cafes lined to open this year will also be equipped with touch screen digital audio and video jukeboxes, she said adding that the existing outlet in new friends colony had also being turned into a book cafe.