Citykart Retail is planning to expand its retail presence to a total count of 300 stores in the next three years and will invest around Rs 200- 300 crore for the same, Sudhanshu Agarwal, Founder & CEO, Citykart Retail, told FinancialExpresscom. “We are currently running 92 Citykart stores spread across 76 cities and 7 states. Citykart team is all geared up to expand its footprint further by adding more stores and take the total count of stores to 300 in the next 3 years,” he said. The value retail firm will fund the expansion plans through internal accruals and further fund raise. To date, Citykart has raised Rs 105 crore which is primarily utilized for the expansion of business. Citykart posted gross sales of approximately Rs 559.09 crore during FY 2022-23, growing at 40 per cent as against the previous year. For FY 2023-24, the company is projecting gross sales of Rs 740 crore, growing at approximately 34 per cent on-year.
Here are the edited excerpt from the interview.
What are the most sold categories at Citykart? What is the most popular mode of payment?
We sell fashion apparel for men, women and kids. In apparel, knitwear products like t-shirts and shorts are the most sold categories across all divisions. We also sell general merchandise items like travel accessories, household utility items, home furnishing, etc. Travel accessories and household utility items are the most popular categories in general merchandise. In terms of payment mode, cash and UPI are the most popular modes of payment among our customers.
How is purposeful AI, technology helping brands improve customer experience and accessibility?
Technology has become an integral part of every retail organization operating multiple stores across geographies. In addition to managing the front end and back-end operations, we extensively leverage technology and data analytics to generate meaningful insights around customer preferences, inventory management, cost optimization, profit maximization, etc. We believe that analytics and AI will help retailers to improve customer service and drive efficiencies across the organization and we are making investments around the same.
Do you think value retail works better in metro cities or in tier-II and beyond regions? Why?
Value retail works better in tier-II and beyond regions, because the majority of the population in tier-II and beyond regions have lower per capita income in comparison to people living in tier-I towns. This makes the citizens in tier-II and beyond towns more value conscious and they prefer to shop from retailers who provide in-trend good quality fashion and other utility products at reasonable prices along with a good shopping environment.
How is value retailing faring in today’s India? What are your strategies to stay ahead of the curve?
Value retail is growing across the country. Value retail will grow further as India moves towards becoming a $5 trillion economy. Growth in the economy will significantly improve the disposable income of the lower and middle income group Indians and they will spend more on clothing, accessories, and other aspirational categories to make their life better. We are very excited about this opportunity, and we are working towards maximizing the share of wallet of the existing and future customers.
We are extensively leveraging data analytics to get insights into customer behavior, preferences and emerging fashion trends. Based on these insights we drive our merchandising, marketing and customer acquisition and retention strategy. We also leverage various physical and digital marketing tools to continuously communicate our quality and value proposition to the target audience.
Do Indian consumers still look for discounts at value retail brands? How does discounting work in value retail? Does it affect the margins and if not, quality of products?
Of course, no one is there who doesn’t want discounts. Especially us Indians are big value seekers. Discounts and innovative offers help us to attract new customers and encourage existing customers to increase their frequency of visits to our stores. We never compromise with the quality of products offered on discounts. Discounts do lead to reduced margins in percentage terms but the spike in sales volume helps in retaining the rupee gross margins.
Tell us about the retail presence for Citykart and your expansion plans for the brand.
We are currently running 92 Citykart stores spread across 76 cities and 7 states. The Citykart team is all geared up to expand its footprint further by adding more stores and take the total count of stores to 300 in the next 3 years. Expansion will be a combination of both going deeper into regions where we are strong like UP and Bihar as we are looking to fortify this region at the same time exploring new geographies like Northeast, Odisha and Bengal.
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