Home Solutions Retail to spend Rs 500 crore

Home Solutions Retail (HSRL), part of the Future Group, will be investing Rs 500 crore in its consumer durables and electronics (CDE) retailing venture in the next two years. The company is planning to take the number of its eZone stores, the premium CDE format, to 100 stores in the next two years from 26 stores now and the number of stores in the Electronic Bazaar to 200 stores from 65 stores now. From both the formats, the retailer is expecting revenues of Rs 800 crore by the end of 2007-08 and Rs 3,000 crore by the end of 2009-2010. By expanding both the value and premium formats the company wants to explore the total opportunity and wants to dominate big cities and tier-II towns and stay ahead of competition. Consumer durable and electronics market is expected to be around Rs 25,000 crore in the country. Large untapped opportunity saw corporates entering the fray such as Tata`s Croma, Videocon`s Next, Reliance Digital and others. The company is looking at 30 per cent to 50 per cent growth. The share of its private labels- Koryo and Sensei will grow up to 20 per cent to 22 per cent of the total sales in the next couple of years from 12 per cent to 15 per cent now. The company at present has 52 service centres across 45 locations. The stores posted total sales of Rs 100 crore during Diwali last year and expect higher sales during the Christmas-New Year period. The company has plans to increase its retail space from 0.5 million sq feet to 2 million sq feet in the couple of years.