The sports footwear and apparel major, Adidas India Marketing Pvt Ltd has planned to open 200 outlets by the end of calendar year 2009. Speaking in an exclusive interview, Andreas Gellner, MD, Adidas India stated, “We are planning to open 200 stores by December 2009. It looks pretty much like our plans would become reality.”
Gellner further stated that the new stores would be present in a mix of higher tier as well as lower tier cities such as tier III and tier IV towns. “Our growth is happening through more intensive penetration of metros like Delhi, but it is also coming from smaller environments like tier III and tier IV cities,” Gellner remarked.
Gellner informed that Adidas at present has over 450 stores, out of which around 130 outlets are present in smaller towns.
Commenting on the recent media reports about Adidas closing down a number of its stores, Gellner stated, “For every retailer, to review store portfolios and closing down one or the other store is an ongoing and normal routine.”
“But obviously, in the current environment when the consumer demand is not very strong and the rentals have been unhealthily inflated in the last two years, there is probably even a bigger sense of reviewing the store portfolio and making decisions to close stores which don’t have the outlook to become profitable in the near future. So that’s what we are doing on an ongoing basis. We have been closing a few outlets. But the net addition would be 200 stores this year. I don’t think there is anything abnormal in this practice and every retailer should do this.”
— Bhavya Misra
