Targetting 4,000 stores in two years, wider footprint: Grasim

The company's focus will be on value-added products and innovative products, says Dilip Gaur, MD of Grasim Industries.

Speaking to CNBC-TV18, Dilip Gaur, MD of Grasim Industries, said the company's aim would be to double the number of outlets to 4,000 stores in the next one or two years. They will also increase their footprint by entering more cities, he added.

The company's focus will be on value-added products and innovative products. "The front-end will be Liva and backend will be innovation," he said. The Aditya Birla company had launched Liva one year ago and has 2,000 stores in 140 cities. Below is the verbatim transcript of Dilip Gaur’s interview with Priya Sheth on CNBC-TV18.

Q: What is your strategy to grow the brand in the next four to five years?
A: Our idea is at least in the foreseeable future we will be doubling the number of outlets we cover and more cities so maybe in next one or two years we will do more than 4,000 stores. That is what we are planning to do.

Q: In terms of Viscose Staple Fibre (VSF) also you are looking at specialty fibres going ahead. What is the strategy for that? Is there going to be more capacities that you are going to be putting out for this?
A: If you see, last year our specialty component in Liva grew up from 28 percent to 36 percent. The whole idea about VSF is to go into more value added products. So, we are doing what we call generation III fibre which is the modal fibre, dyed fibre, we are working on generation IV fibre. So there is a huge innovative effort going in to build value added products.

We are attacking from two sides, the frontend is the Liva where we are working with the consumer and the customer to grow the demand, c;reate a pool and the backend is the innovation where we are creating new value added products which will give us a better realisation and more value to the customer in the value chain. So, I think that will help us go into more categories. As we go along you will see us coming into more categories for women, men and then the home furnishing, etc. So, that is the whole strategy.

Q: In terms of revenues, do you have any targets as far as the retail business is concerned, if you could give us some sort of an indicative figure?
A: Our idea is not to generate revenue from Liva, our idea is to grow the pie. As I told you we have got a double digit growth and we believe that we will help VSF industry grow double digit in next four to five years.

Just to give you an idea what the potential is, the per capita consumption of VSF based fabric in India is only 0.11 and the global average is 0.75 and China is 1.5. So, you can imagine what the kind of scope is. What Liva is working on is to bring us to a level so we can see if it works and if we work together we can see a huge growth in the VSF industry.