Aditya Birla Retail Limited is the retail arm of Aditya Birla Group, $40 billion corporation.

The Company ventured into food and grocery retail sector in 2007 with the acquisition of a south based supermarket chain. Subsequently, Aditya Birla Retail Ltd.expanded its presence across the country under the brand "more." with 2 formatsSupermarket & Hypermarket.
Supermarket more. - Conveniently located in neighbourhoods, more. supermarkets cater to the daily, weekly and monthly shopping needs of consumers. The product offerings include a wide range of fresh fruits & vegetables, groceries, personal care, home care, general merchandise and a basic range of apparels. Currently, there are over 493 more.supermarkets across the country. Hypermarket more.MEGASTORE - is a one-stop shopping destination for the entire family. Besides a large range of products across fruit & vegetables, groceries, FMCG products,more.MEGASTORE also has a strong emphasis on general merchandise, apparels & CDIT. Currently, fourteen hypermarkets operate under the brand more.MEGASTORE in Mysore; Vadodara; Indore; Mahadevpura, Old Madras Road, Bull Temple Road & 4th Block Jayangar in Bengaluru; Thane & Vashi in Mumbai; Saroor Nagar & Kukatpally in Hyderabad, Rohini & Kirti Nagar in New Delhi & Nashik Clubmore. - our loyalty program, currently has a strong membership base of over 3 million Clubmore Members. What is SMART SHOPPING? Indulge in guilt-free Smart Shopping with more. brands. No Advertisement, and No celebrity endorsements, ensure that maximum savings are passed on to our Smart Shoppers!

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Less Is More For Aditya Birla Retail 18 May 2012

Aditya Birla Retail Business Head Pranab Barua closes down 27 More stores in Mumbai
Pranab Barua, Business Head - Apparel and Retail of Aditya Birla Retail (ABR), is in action. Like his predecessor Thomas Varghese, Barua is tightening the loose ends of retail business by downing shutters on 27 supermarket stores under the brand More in Mumbai. These stores had turned loss-making due to the high rentals and rising competition. Barua finds hyper markets to be the ideal retail model for Mumbai. "Except for the one profitable super market, which is at Kharghar in Navi Mumbai, we have closed down all the small retail shops in Mumbai. Similarly, we will look at the viability of supermarkets in high-rental places like Delhi," says Barua, who earlier was the managing director of Reckitt Benckiser India. Depending on the location and size of the catchments, the company will decide between supermarkets and hyper markets. ABR, a privately held company of Kumar Mangalam Birla, has 500 supermarkets and 12 hyper markets under More. Supermarkets were the one where the company had expanded rapidly in the first phase, and then closed many. During the time of Thomas Varghese, the company closed down more than 100 stores in two years and opened 5060 at cost efficient locations. Unlike super markets, ABR started slowly in hypermarkets segment, but picked momentum in metros, posing threat to bigger players like Big Bazaar and Reliance Retail. But overall, Birla's food and grocery retail chain continues to make losses despite spending over Rs 600 crore on building the network across the country. ABR had reported a net loss of Rs 423 crore in the year ended March 2011 on net sales of Rs 1,637 crore. According to earlier estimates, the

company will hit EBIDTA profitability by 2013 and PAT profitability by 2015, in 7-8 years of its operation. Barua is now focusing on controlling the costs to turn around the retail business. "We need to increase the throughput and margins to sustain the growth," he says. While controlling the costs by shutting down the loss-making shops in Mumbai, Barua aims to expand the business in low-capital cost cities with supermarkets. "In this financial year, we plan to open 70-80 supermarkets, in addition to adding 5-6 hypermarkets," he explains. In opening hyper markets, ABR faced delay because of the developer in most projects. With the financial downturn hit twice the market, most of the projects are completing at snail speed. In this environment of below 7 per cent GDP, the job of Barua is to change the retail business into cost efficient with the reduction or addition of stores, say analysts. According to a research report by The Boston Consulting Group (BCG), the organized retail in the country is growing at over 25 per cent and reaching a size of $44 billion by 2012. However, Indian players are still at nascent stage in forming a successful retail model, estimate analysts. While building retail business, the Aditya Birla group is seriously considering building its apparel portfolio under listed entity Aditya Birla Nuvo. For getting the operational synergies at the back end and plugging gaps in womenswear and kidswear, Nuvo decided to acquire a controlling stake in the rival Pantaloon retail chain, controlled by Big Bazar's Kishore Biyani. Unlike before, Birla is fast consolidating his consumer facing businesses at various levels. It's a tough task ahead.

More of More: Aditya Birla Retail back on track

Mumbai, May 29, 2012

The More brand stores of Aditya Birla Retail Ltd seems to be getting back on track after losing its way briefly, which led to its closing 200 stores a few years ago. At its peak, ABRL had 656 supermarket stores in 2008-09. The companys new CEO Pranab Barua credits the turnaround to doing small things right. While the company started this financial year with just under 500 More stores, ABRL looks to cross 600 mark this year, and plans to open 80100 stores per year over the next 3 years. We are in a much better position than in 2008, said Barua, refusing to put a timeline to profitability. Adding new stores will continue to be a way of life. We have a robust network now and hope to grow the same in chosen clusters to strengthen synergies, said Barua. The stores we have now are well poised to provide the highest standards of products and great service to our customers. After the 2008-09 period, the company went through a period of store rationalisation and re-worked strategies that primarily included bringing down its real estate costs and expansion in the right geographies. The retail firm is also looking at scaling up its hypermarket business, a segment that took time to take off and now every retailer is plugging to it.