Avenue Supermart buys retail space in Mumbai’s Chembur for Rs 113 crore

Billionaire Radhakishan Damani’s retail chain DMart has bought two floors spread over 39,000 sq ft in realty developer Wadhwa Group’s under-construction project, The Epicenter, in the Chembur suburbs of Mumbai for more than Rs 113 crore.Avenue Supermarts, the company that formally owns the retail chain, has paid stamp duty charges worth Rs 2.26 crore for the transaction concluded recently.Along with this retail space on the ground and first floors of the project, Avenue Supermarts will also get access to 78 car parking slots, showed the agreement accessed by ET.The deal stands out because the usual industry practice is to lease retail spaces.The project is being developed on a two-acre land parcel that was acquired from beverage and consumer goods firm PepsiCo India. The plot earlier housed a factory that was used for manufacturing Duke’s beverages apart from PepsiCo’s other soft drink brands and was not operational since 2014.The Wadhwa Group is jointly developing a mixed-used project with South India-based developer Salarpuria Sattva Group on this plot.Both have recently launched a new project, Dukes Horizon, alongside a commercial project, The Epicentre, on the same plot. The developers hold 50% equity each in the project and are responsible for all the functions – from construction to designing and marketing.All the approvals for the project are in place and the two-acre plot, which was acquired for around Rs 200 crore, will have around 5 lakh sq ft of residential and commercial development.ET’s email query to Radhakishan Damani and the Wadhwa Group remained unanswered until the publication of this report.After the launch of its first store in the Powai suburbs of Mumbai in 2002, the DMart chain has presence in 221 locations across Maharashtra, Gujarat, Andhra Pradesh, Madhya Pradesh, Karnataka, Telangana, Chhattisgarh, NCR, Tamil Nadu, Punjab and Rajasthan.The company has added nine stores to its portfolio in the financial year 2020-21 and has converted two stores to fulfilment centres (FC) to scale up its e-commerce business.“Following subdued store addition pace in FY21E, we expect the company to make up for the same in FY22E. We bake in 93 incremental stores in FY21-23E (sq ft addition of nearly 5.9 million, assuming it continues adding large format stores of nearly 65,000 sq ft),” ICICI Direct Research said in a recent report.For the quarter ended December, Avenue Supermarts reported over 19% on-year and 124% sequential growth in its net profit at Rs 470.25 crore.Total income for the period increased 11% on-year and 42% sequentially to Rs 7,482 crore.
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