Bharti Retail has robust expansion for next 3-yrs: CEO

For Bharti Retail, that manages convenience stores under the Easyday brand, 2014 was a year that saw management upheaval.

There was a split from joint venture partner Walmart and accumulated looses. However, the recently elevated CEO, Craig Wimsatt is hoping to turn the fortunes around by trimming costs and sticking to its expansion strategy.

Below is the transcript of Craig Wimsatt’s interview with CNBC-TV18's Zahra KhanCraig: If you look at modern trade whether it is modern retail bricks and mortar stores or whether it is modern e-commerce that only represents about five percent of the business within India today. So the opportunities to serve in e-commerce and opportunities to serve in brick and mortar is fantastic. Our take on e-commerce is that there may be a time that we will test or experiment with e-commerce, currently we are not.Q: The brick and mortar space, can we see more expansion there? Any growth plans in 2015, can we see you adding more stores?Craig: First as far as the growth story we are in the growth mode. We have opened up seven super markets in the last number of months and we have another five to ten supermarkets that we will be seeing open in the next several months as well. We have a couple of hyper markets coming up that are in the works. So, we are very positive about expansion of our business. In fact we are just working on our plans for the next three years and I would say we have an aggressive expansion plan.We are in the middle of finalising where that would be. I would say that we have come out to say that there is 100 stores that are certainly possible within the next three years. I believe that as we continue to have success we certainly can challenge whether or not we could do more.