See LTL growth of 8-9% in FY16: Shoppers Stop

Shoppers Stop reported a 17 percent like-to-like (LTL) Q3 growth aided by strong volume growth, says Govind Shrikhande, Managing Director of the company. The company’s volume grew at 16 percent in the quarter gone-by.

The company reported a 71.31 percent jump in net profit to Rs 23.59 crore in the third quarter ended December 31. The total income from operations rose 19.06 percent to Rs 911.75 crore as against Rs 765.79 crore in the corresponding period a year ago.

In an interview with CNBC-TV18, Shrikhande says that the company will achieve its LTL guidance of 8-9 percent in FY16 and 9-10 percent in FY17.

Below is the verbatim transcript of Govind Shrikhande's interview with Sonia Shenoy and Ekta Batra on CNBC-TV18.Ekta: While your topline increased by around 18 percent, can you tell us what the like-to-like (LTL) growth was this quarter?A: LTL this quarter was 17 percent driven strongly by very high volume growth of 16 percent, which is something that we haven’t seen for a very long period of time and in fact even 17 percent LTL growth has come almost after about 8-9 quarters.Sonia: You had indicated earlier that we would see a high LTL growth in second half, so in that light what is your outlook for Q4 and for FY17?A: We had said that for the whole year we were targeting 8-9 percent LTL growth and when Q2 ended, we were just about one percent and that is where I had said that second half definitely should be at overall double digit to catch up on 8-9 percent LTL growth and that is what has happened. So, Q3 is at about 17 percent. Q4 should still be in a single digit but we are still looking at 7-8 percent LTL growth. So whole year should be at 8-9 percent LTL growth, next year we are looking at about 9 percent LTL growth as well.Reema: What is FY17 looking like from an EBITDA margin perspective?A: This year we should end up about 6.3 percent EBITDA in the limited SSL results. We are targeting above 7 percent for the next financial year.(Copy edited by Rishma Kapur, interview transcribed by Sonal Jadhav)