New Delhi: Mukesh Ambani-led Reliance group’s retail juggernaut seems to be gaining scale uninterrupted, despite hiccups like political protests.
Reliance Retail, within the four months of rolling out its first store in November 2007, has touched an outlet base of 500 stores in various formats, spanning three million square foot of occupied space in various cities.
The expansion of retail space has been achieved alongside the company’s customer loyalty programme, Reliance One, which has also touched a membership base of three million customers.
The average of one loyal customer per square foot of retail space is probably the highest and fastest loyalty programme amongst all the retail companies in India, according to industry people who did not wish to be identified.
Reliance Retail, a 100% subsidiary of the country’s most valued firm Reliance Industries Ltd, is targeting to make its loyalty programme one of the top 10 loyalty card base in the worldwide retail sector by 2012.
Reliance One, a pre-paid facility which allows customers to start using it right from the point of purchase, is valid across all the nine different formats of Reliance Retail stores.
Building on the success of Reliance One, the company is also seeking to become “the distributor of choice” for all financial services companies with an all-India footprint at every product level, said an industry source.
“The objective of Reliance Retail is to have substantial market share in every product category and scale to drive differentiated and significant value added deals for customers,“ he said.
At the same time, with India set to see a large number of stores and brand choices, and money being the foremost necessity, the financial service firms would be able to leverage the distribution strength of Reliance Retail, which it is planning to expand further aggressively to reach every corner of India,” he added.
Reliance Retail is planning an investment of Rs25,000 crore in the next 2-3 years and is aiming to usher in a revolution in the agricultural and retail sectors with its aggressive and innovative approach.
The various formats operational under Reliance Retail brand are Reliance Fresh, Reliance Digital for consumer durables and information technology, Reliance Mart, a Hyper Market, Reliance Trends - the apparel store, Reliance Wellness offering wellness products, Reliance I store - the apple store, Reliance Footprint -a footwear store, Reliance Jewels - a jewelry store, Reliance Time-Out- books, music and gifts store and Reliance Super- a Minimart Format.
The company’s Reliance One membership card is the first Retail loyalty card with a bar code and a magnetic strip and being a pre-paid facility, does not require any documents as is the case of other such cards, which are mostly credit card based.