Sunil Nair, VP-Technology Solutions, Max Hypermarkets India, on exploring supermarket as a format.

Steadily moving out of southern market with more store counts, Max Hypermarkets is also planning to strengthen its omni-channel presence to beat the competition. Sunil Nair, VP-Technology Solutions, Max Hypermarkets India, reveals increasing the store count to 30 by 2020, while speaking to Indianretailer.

What plans are afoot for the coming five years? 
We are planning to take our stores count from 18 to 30 in the next five years. Also, we are trying to explore supermarket as a format for which the plan is under discussion as well as we are expanding through omni-channel space.

Have you defined the territories for your different store formats? 
Predominantly for hypermarket as a destination, we are targeting tier I markets, the supermarkets will be set up in tier II cities and omni-channel presence will be spread across tier I and II markets.
We are looking for 40,000 to 60,000 sq ft of area for hypermarkets as a traditionally anchor store in malls. With supermarkets, we are planning to tap Delhi and Southern markets because we have a larger presence in South.

What services are you looking at to establish an omni-channel presence?
We are aiming consumer as a physical entity and so in the online space we are trying to give them the additional avenue of shopping due to their issues of lack of time, transportation and traffic in cities and towns. So going omni channel, we are trying to offer one more service of shopping online at our website and delivering of goods to the doorstep of consumers.
We are not getting into the game of faster delivery, what we are looking forward is additional service dynamics part within the periphery of five kilometres of existing stores. All the deliveries will be done through existing stores.
Still, we are in the process of developing our website and further strengthening it with the transaction perspective. Currently, we are delivering in Bengaluru, Delhi, Chennai, Coimbatore and Ghaziabad.

Anything special for the upcoming festive season?
For the festive season we are gearing up with the more services and more products.

What is your current revenue? And what is the target for March 2016?
This year we have earned the revenue of Rs 1000cr and next year we are planning to achieve around Rs 1,500 figure.