Carrefour China western regional manager Arnaud Dupont said that the group plans to open five new stores in Sichuan province over the next three years.

The supermarket chain already has five stores in the provincial capital Chengdu. Dupont said that the May 12 earthquake had not changed the group’s positive assessment of the Sichuan market.

Dupont also disclosed that on July 16 he signed an agreement with the local authorities to open a store in the popular resort city of Dujiangyan which was badly hit in the May 12 earthquake with the loss of more than 3,000 lives. He said the decision to invest in Dujiangyan had been made before May 12 but remained sound on commercial grounds.

Dupont said that to date Carrefour Group has donated CHY23 million to the quake relief and reconstruction effort and an ongoing initiative has so far raised a further CHY4 million.

Carrefour Group is the second largest retailer in the world after Walmart. It currently has 117 stores in mainland China and 40 stores in Taiwan. It opened its first Taiwan store in 1989 and its first mainland China store in 1995.

However, the company plans to keep 90 per cent these stores on franchised model and the remaining 10 per cent as company-owned showrooms, informed Ahluwalia.

Further, the company plans to expand its retail space by taking basements and first floors of the buildings on lease. “Rentals drop by 30 to 50 per cent if we open our stores in basements or first floors”, added Ahluwalia. The average space of the retail stores would extend from 900 to 3,000 square feet.

Meanwhile Ahluwalia accepted that the Rs 7.93 billion Koutons retail may fall short of its revenue target for current fiscal. “Economic slump effect is on the entire country. It has affected the retail sectors as well,” concluded Aluwalia.

Source : IndiaRetailing

The new stores of Bata will be primarily located in tier-I and tier-II cities like Sonepat, Kota, Jodhpur, Ludhiana, Kakinada, Berampur, Mandya, Gangtok, Hassan, Hubli, Ahmednagar, Nasik, and others, apart from the metros. This will help Bata to offer its contemporary and trendy footwear range to potential customers in small towns. These products are currently available in Bata’s international format outlets.

Announcing this, Bata India managing director Macelo Villagran said: “Bata India has opened over 150 new large format stores since 2006 and will continue to open 60 new outlets every year. Our retail expansion plans are aimed at meeting the shoe requirements of our customers across India. We thank our customers for their continued brand loyalty, which has helped us get this recognition from the industry.”

Bata India plans to open 240 new outlets across the country over the next three years with an investment of up to Rs 480 crore. According to the company, the cost of a new outlet would typically vary between Rs 1.5 crore and Rs 2 crore. Further, the company also plans to use the surplus cash for expansion and upgradation of 60 to 80 existing outlets.

Bata is the largest footwear retailer in India with more than 1,200 stores. The company is focusing on manufacturing shoes for defence and paramilitary personnel as well as airlines and hospitals to increase institutional selling.

The Indian footwear market is pegged at roughly Rs 10,000 crore in value terms and is growing at 10% annually.

According to Diesel US CEO Steve Birkhold, Renzo Rosso, the company’s founder, recognizes the value of PR and marketing and has increased its spend. “In a time of economic difficulty, Renzo Rosso believes now is the time to makes sure we clearly communicate what our brand stands for and what our path forward in future is,” Birkhold said.

However, rather than throw a typical splashy launch party, the company chose a more localized and “understated” approach in deference to the economic downturn, he noted.

The PR team, working with Fingerprint Communications, transformed the store window into a dining room. Throughout the week iconic New York figures like Giants players and Ford models will sit, in full view of passers-by and partake in dinners catered by well-known New York restaurants. Diesel also planned to deploy a “street team” in Mohawks and Diesel gear for the week.

“We’ve shifted our strategy to… focus on [driving] traffic into our retail stores because the majority of our business is our retail stores,” he said. “We didn’t solicit a lot of media. We thought we’d do it organically… People are going to walk by and discover it.”

Source: PR Week

Falabella S.A.C.I.

The retailer will install the Retalix StoreLine POS system for the implementation, which also includes Fujitsu TeamPOS 3000 XL POS terminals and Datalogic hand-held scanners.

“This rollout with Retalix is part of an aggressive investment plan to implement state-of-the-art, world-class information technology to offer the best levels of security, agility and efficiency in all our operations,” said Cesar Hashimoto, CIO of Falabella’s Supermarket Division. “Our IT investments are helping us to increase efficiencies at the point-of-sale to enhance customer service and the shopping experience, as well as procurement, distribution and inventory in our supermarkets — all to the benefit and satisfaction of our customers.”

The StoreLine application contains advanced POS functionality that supports customer loyalty, self-checkout, fuel management, QSR and a variety of electronic payment services.

Retalix is working with Bell Tech in Chile and Peru to provide hardware, project management and ongoing support for new store openings.

Falabella operates department stores, home improvement centers, grocery hypermarkets, financial retail operations and real estate ventures in Chile, Peru, Argentina and Colombia. The company achieved consolidated revenues of more than $5.7 billion in 2007, while investing a record of more than $600 million in capital expenditures.

The stores’ openings will come just weeks after the retailer cut 600 people from its headquarters staff amid what it called weaker-than-expected sales.

The retailer will hold grand openings for the 21 general merchandise stores and six full-grocery SuperTarget stores on Sunday. The new sites include the company’s first two stores in Hawaii.

Each general merchandise store employs 150 to 250 people, and each SuperTarget has 200 to 300 workers, the company said.

In late January, Minnesota-based Target cut its headquarters staff by 9 percent and eliminated 400 open positions. The company, citing difficult economic conditions and sales that didn’t meet expectations, also said it would soon close an Arkansas distribution center that employs 500 people and would cut back on planned new-store openings.

“We are clearly operating in an unprecedented economic environment that requires us to make some extremely difficult decisions to ensure Target remains competitive over the long term,” Gregg Steinhafel, Target president and CEO, said in a news release that month.

Retailers in the United States took a hit last year as a weak economy weighed on consumer spending. Retail sales fell six straight months until January, when sales rose 1 percent, according to the Commerce Department. However, retail experts said they were skeptical a rebound had taken hold.

Still, two other retailers also announced plans to expand. Kohl’s announced last month that it intends to open 55 stores in 2009, and Dollar General in February said it is looking to open more than 400 stores.

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As Western markets falter, high-end retailers are searching for places where consumers are hungry for more glitzy brands and luxury products. India, in some ways, fills the bill, even as its economy cools.

While India makes up just 0.4 percent of global luxury good sales, the market is growing at 25 percent a year, according to a recent Bain & Co. study. There are 1.5 million households in India who could afford luxury goods, compared with 1.6 million households in China, according to McKinsey.

The numbers have prompted some luxury brand names to open retail stores in the largest cities in India in recent months, despite the economic downturn.

New entrants say that gaining a foothold in India has not been easy, and doing business has been difficult.

John Hooks, deputy managing director at Giorgio Armani, said he made dozens of trips to India over several years before partnering with DLF, a real estate giant. Foreign retailers are limited to 51 percent ownership of stores in India.

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The stores of the 22 large chain medical companies, including Hubei Longtai Drugstore, Hubei Jinyaotang Drugstore, Wuhan Jianghan Drugstore, Wuhan Hansen Drugstore, cover Wuhan and nine other cities in Hubei Province, have more than 40% of the market in Wuhan.

According to a representative from Hubei Longtai Drugstore, most of the retail drugstores in Wuhan rely on the supply of medical distribution channels. Medicines are distributed through a lengthy supply chain of national general distributors, provincial general distributors, regional general distributors, and regional distributors before reaching the retail stores, which increase the costs of the products.

After the establishment of the alliance, the medicine purchases for more 2,000 chain drugstores belonging to 22 companies will be made by a professional agency. With this new platform, the retail prices of medicines sold in these stores are expected to be reduced by 3% to 5% as a result of simplifying the distribution process.

In addition, the alliance will be further expanded in the future and the number of member retail medical companies will ultimately reach over 30 with their stores covering 17 cities across the province.