Essar joins the retail bandwagon
By Our Corporate Bureau | 31 Oct 2006
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The Rs 10,000 crore Essar Group is getting into retail. It will launch stores to sell mobile phones by December or February.
Mobile Shop, the likely name for Essar Group's telecom retailing venture, is set to offer you mobile phones and accessories. Sources say the group will launch 300 to 600 square foot stores in the next two or four months.
It will start out with the top 10 cities and it hopes to have 2,500 stores up by 2008. Over the next five years, Essar will invest about Rs 1,500 crore in the venture.
The buzz is that Richard Branson's Virgin Group will chip in with technical support and store design, reports CNBC-TV18. In markets like the US and Britain, Virgin runs a chain of stores called Virgin Megastores.
