Shoppers Stop adds store in Chennai

Shoppers Stop has opened a new store at Shyamala, Chennai.

With the opening of this store, the company now has 41 stores (including two airport stores) under its operation. Of late, the retailer has shut down a loss-making high-end fashion chain, turned around home-solutions chain, increased stake in its budding hypermarket chain, while recording a sharp growth in sales from those stores which have been in existence for a year. The chain has charted a steady pace of store expansion, as has been its norm over the years, even as peers vacillated between aggressive and slow expansion.

It’s among the few listed retailers with a steadily growing national scale of operations and a well-etched brand name. It has store formats straddling the premium and mass-market segment. It plans to use internal resources to fund expansion, checking a possible rise in interest costs. As a percentage of sales, interest costs dropped to 1 per cent in FY ’11, helping maintain net margins at 2 per cent. With internal accruals funding expansion, tightening liquidity and rising interest rates may not pressure margins. It may be noted that Shoppers Stop operates in the premium category in the smaller towns and, additionally, in the bridge-to-luxury segment in the bigger cities.