The Aditya Birla group made a bold leap of faith in the year 2006, when they bought out Trinethra Super Retail, a long standing player in the organised retail business in South India.
Trinethra itself was the result of consolidation of two other chains – Fabmall and Fabcity. The advantage that the group got from this acquisition was that it became a scale player at one shot in two states – AP and Karnataka – which were individual strong holds of Trinethra and Fabmall, before these two entities merged.
Trinethra worked on a direct store delivery model (hence had to be supplied through distributors). The entry of the Aditya Birla group brought financial muscle and organised operations to the centralised DC model.
Post the takeover in 2007, a re-branding exercise was carried out – the stores were named – more – for you : signifying a value proposition to the consumer who shopped there. Like many others who bet big on the retail rush in 2007-08, more too went on a store opening spree – and like all of them, had to resort to closures when the going got tough.
However, more had one good experiment going on even while the smaller stores were facing turmoil. ABRL was pretty much the pioneer in the large Hypermarket format, with a couple of stores operational in the West (Baroda and Aurangabad I think). In fact, ABRL Hyper used to be a separate chain back then, and was a separate entity in the ABRL eco system also. The results of this experiment with the large format paved ABRL confident expansion in other cities, and became a game changer of sorts, being emulated (or maybe the other chains also realised it at the same time) by other chains as well.
Eventually, the Hypermarket model became the favoured expansion vehicle for this, as well as other chains.
ABRL also pioneered a few ahead of the curve initiatives, like a monthly promotions booklet in each super market store which contained information about the various promos across categories.
ABRL had also realised pretty early that as operations increased in scale, supplier development would become paramount. Their hypermarket team was one of the first teams in the country to on board vendors about the new purchase management system, and how they would eventually want to move to vendor managed inventory.
While ABRL’s central team did initiate these and other pioneering efforts, in store execution and MIS integration between the southern states and rest of India remained operational challenges for a long time. Not really sure whether things have improved on this front since then. Another major challenge faced by vendors was the constant churn in personnel – new faces came in almost every 6 months or so.
It is sincerely hoped that the ABRL team is able to bridge the gap between strategy and execution – it is really strong on the strategy and thought leadership front, and can leapfrog its rivals if it manages to get the execution piece right.
Landmark stores:
Hyderabad – Jubilee Hills Road No 36.
Bangalore – HAL Airport Road, Indira Nagar
Chennai – Anna Nagar