Pantaloon Retail sees 30% growth in revenue this year

Pantaloon Retail sees 30% growth in revenue this year

As fears over swine flu spread across India, its effect is gradually being seen in the retail sector as well. Kishore Biyani, chief executive officer, Pantaloon Retail (India) Ltd, said in an interview that his company saw some impact on sales in Pune and Mumbai.

He, however, also said that the firm aimed to achieve at least 30% growth in revenue this year. Edited excerpts:What’s your sense of how this sales season will be, given that there is a swine flu scare going on?

We had much bigger plans and we are much organized this time. We had a lot of stock and a lot of collaborative approach with the manufacturers, but we have some impact in Pune, none of our stores is closed except one store in Pimpri (in Pune district).We are seeing decent business, but not crowd as we normally see..., but we are still expecting a sale of about Rs250 crore and whatever our yesterday’s number suggests, we are on track.

So you don’t see any big dip this time around year-on-year because of the kind of footfalls that have been happening?

We had about 6-8% lower sales in Mumbai than what we had expected. Pune was less than 20% but we have 116 overall stores in the country. The northern, southern and eastern region have done more than expectations and we have balanced out in that sense.I believe that you had indicated to investors that you are gunning for a 16-17% same-store growth in FY10.

Are you on track for that kind of an aggressive growth target?

We are looking at close to 30% growth and not 16-17%, so we are looking at 3.5-4 million sq. ft of expansion as a group in this fiscal year and that will contribute to some growth and also growth will happen out of same-store sales growth.So we are confident of 30% growth, not same-store, but overall growth in terms of revenue.

Posted by- Deepak Khatri