Hyderabad: Corporate giant Reliance Industries formally entered the country's fairly young organised retail market through its 'Reliance Fresh' format stores in Hyderabad, while reassuring petty traders that the company was no threat to them.
In fact, the company's retail format for selling vegetables, fruits and groceries, offered an opportunity for neighbourhood stores and even push cart sellers to source supplies at competitive rates making it a win-win situation for all, Reliance Industries (RIL) officials claimed.
"They (Kirana stores and push cart sellers) will benefit from us. The argument that they will be affected is not supported by numbers," RIL President and CEO (Operations and Strategy) Raghu Pillai told reporters just before the inauguration of the first Reliance Fresh retail outlet in the upmarket Banjara Hills in Hyderabad.
Reliance Fresh, 10 more of whose outlets were inaugurated on Friday, marks the front-end of the company's much larger agriculture initiative that involves setting up farm product sourcing centres, supply chain and finally retailing.
The neighbourhood format has been designed keeping the needs of homemakers in mind and stocked with a wide variety of vegetables, fruits, eggs, dairy products and groceries and priced competitively, Pillai said.
"We are not harming small retail players, the market is growing by 8 per cent which is $24-25 billion (nearly Rs 1,12,500 crore) every year. We are aiming at revenues of only $25 billion in four years even if the market grows by $100 billion by 2015, organised retail would be still less than 10-12 per cent of retail trade," he said.
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