Senco Gold plans broader retail expansion
Senco Gold plans broader retail expansion

Jewellery house Senco Gold and Diamonds is planning to invest Rs 350cr within by 2018 to give shape to their broader retail expansion plans. Unveiling the future course of action during an event, where Senco Gold & Diamonds announced Sourav Ganguly as the brand ambassador, Suvankar Sen, Executive Director of the jewellery company spoke to Indianretailer.com and talked about scaling up, the recent association with Sourav Ganguly and the road ahead.

How would the association with Sourav Ganguly help you scale up your brand?
While being present offline we will be promoting our new campaign in a big way through media platforms like television, hoardings and radio in effort of taking our USP message forward. And we hope we can increase our number of stores.
Our USP is that we are from Kolkata and all our karigars are Bengalis and Sourav, who is the face of Bengal not only in India but across the world, is actually the best person to talk about our brand.
India is a huge country and a place of huge potential. We have that manufacturing capability of great designs and great craftsmanship. If people will start knowing us with increasing awareness then sky is the limit for our growth.

What are your exact plans and how would you go ahead with them?
With a global icon like Sourav Ganguly on board we would embark on a massive expansion drive. We are planning to increase our store count to around 100 (from the current count of 68) by the end of 2016. While most of our stores being company-owned, these will be spread across tier 2 and 3 cities across the country. That’s because we have already covered tier 1 cities and only a few of them are left. Basically, we have got our stores across the country including Mumbai, Delhi and Bangalore henceforth we are planning to expand in East India.

What will be the investment and the ROI?
In total we are investing around Rs 350 core within two years’ time. Per store we are investing around Rs 9cr to Rs 12cr depending on the city. For this we had raised funding from private equity last year.
In the initial two years the ROI comes around 10 to 15 per cent and after 2-3 years 25 to 30 per cent ROI starts coming.

What would be the online expansion plan for the company?
We are tying up with major online marketplaces to avail our handcrafted jewellery to all the India states. We will be announcing our online expansion plans and reveal the name of market places in the next seven to eight days. Furthermore, after understanding the dynamics of the market, we will be facilitating buying option on our website along with launching our app by December this year.

How you are strategising to attain the turnover of Rs 2000 crore by 2017-18?  
Our existing turnover is of Rs 1000 crore and we are trying to achieve Rs 2000 crore by 2017-18. There are two strategies that we are following: one is to open more stores while ensuring existing ones are also growing well. And the second strategy is, to provide whatever consumer wants. I believe one must have whatever the customer wants.
At the manufacturing side, we are aiming to produce 10,00,000 jewellery pieces per year by the end of next year from the current capacity of 5,00,000 pieces produced every year with the help of 2000 craftsmen. Along with gold jewellery special focus will be given to platinum, silver and diamond Jewellery.

What is your growth percentage Y-O-Y and what’s the target you want to achieve by 2018?
We have been growing by 30 to 40 percent Y-O-Y except the last two years, which have been very difficult for the jewellery industry during which we could grow by 8 to 10 per cent.

What are the plans of launching an IPO?
In the next two to three years we are determined to come up with IPO if the economy is moving in right direction and everything is falling in place for us.

What other countries are you expanding your export to?
Along with Singapore and Dubai we are trying to supply to US, UK, Middle-East and South-East Asia with substantial Indian and Arabic customers.

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