Aditya Birla Group Chairman Kumar Mangalam Birla, on Friday, unveiled the brand “more” for retail business in which the Group will invest over Rs 9,000 crore in the next three years. With this, Mr Birla Joins fellow billionaires Mukesh Ambani and Sunil Mittal in starting retail groups in the country.
Briefing reporters here, Mr Birla said the first supermarket under the “more” brand name would open shortly in Pune and then quickly expand to other major cities in the country.  Mr Birla said “We have invested over Rs 200 crore in the retailing phase at Pune.”
This phase envisages over a dozen supermarkets in Pune, with an average selling space of 10,000 sq ft each. He made it clear that “the investment in r etail will not be out of any of the listed companies in the Aditya Birla Group,” but would come from both debt and equity.  He said “as the investment is spaced over the next three years, we are still to figure out the debt and equity ratio.” However, he emphasised, the company does not intent having a joint venture partner given that the Group has the necessary competencies inhouse.

Expansion plans
The plan is to eventually have 1000 supermarkets and a sizeable number of hypermarkets in the country in phases, Aditya Birla Retail CEO Sumant Sinha said while clarifying that the supermarkets on an average will have a selling area of 10,000 square feet and hypermarkets 75,000 square feet, as the latter encompasses the “concept of shopping everything.”
In January this year, the Group had acquired Trinethra Super Retail which has given them more than half a million square feet of selling area and a strong presence in the supermarket business in four southern states. Mr Birla said as of now Trinethra’s identity will remain and plans to increase its penetration in the South, besides initating a pan-India roll out. 
Eventually, he added, across all of Aditya Birla Retail’s formats, the brand name will be common — the newly unveiled “more.”