Elusive D-Mart CEO says right now he’s not even thinking of profit

The most elusive CEO on D-street, Neville Noronha, Managing Director & CEO, Avenue Supermarts spoke with ET Now's Ayesha Faridi in a rare exclusive.

Edited excerpts:

You have said previously that you are more comfortable with margins of 8-8.5% as at that level you can provide great value to the consumer. Will the current levels of competitive pricing offline and online allow you to hold on to that margin range?

For D Mart, store openings have led to revenue growth. A few quarters back you mentioned that store openings have to improve - are you satisfied with the progress made on this so far?

This year has not been satisfactory on store openings. We opened only 21 stores. We aspired to open much more but that didn’t happen. We hope to do better in FY 2020. Same store sales growth (SSSG) partly made up for this drop in store openings. Our SSSG has pleasantly surprised us and also ..

You were at around 164 stores as of December-end. Given the size of stores and your preference to own real estate, what can be the potential store target over the next 10 years?

We do not give any forward looking statements. All we say is that the market opportunity is too large. Extremely large. Business is not going anywhere. This is not the fastest finger first business and this is a business that will need multiple players with multiple formats.

Yo ..
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