HYDERABAD: Eyeing faster growth, mobile retail store chain UniverCell is looking to aggressively explore the franchise route and add 200 franchise stores in india Andhra Pradesh and Karnataka over the next one year, said Managing Director D Sathish Babu.?

The Chennai-headquartered mobile retail player, backed by private equity firm Peepul Capital, has been growing at over 30% a year and reported sales of Rs 1,100 crore by March 2013.

At a growth rate of 30% a year, the company Currently having 450 retail stores spread across several states, predominantly Southern states, UniverCell is looking to aggressively expand its retail stores network to at least 1,000 stores by 2014-15 with most of the new stores in the franchise format. The company currently has 15 franchise stories.

“While we will continue to expand our company-owned stores mostly in the tier-I and tier-II centres across the country, we will look at adding franchise stores in the tier-III and tier-IV towns, mostly in the semi-urban and rural areas,” said Sathish Babu.

The company, which added just 10 stores in the first ten years of its operations, expanded aggressively by setting up 100 stores in just six months in 2007 taking advantage of the then prevailing mobile telephony boom in the country. “We are going to invest at least Rs 25 crore on expansion of company-owned retail stores over the next one year,” he said.

Sathish Babu expects a boom in smart phone sales over the next couple of years where the country will see the smart phones more than doubling from 18% now to 44% of total portfolio by March 2015. “If the average prices of smart phones fall below Rs 4,000 where the handsets offer good experience, coupled with affordable Internet plans and improved use of mobile Internet, the country will see the next round of boom in mobile telephony sector.”

The Indian mobile phones market, which was at 160 million units valued at $8 billion in 2011, is projected to reach a size of 240 million units valued at $15 billion by 2015 March.



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