Avenue Supermarts

“And so therefore, 15% kind of a gross margin and let's say around a 5% kind of a net margin should be the North Star for this business even in the future.”

“No, our view at this point of time, Ashish, is that, you know, this is the right number at this point in time, at least in the foreseeable future.”

“And so therefore, same-store growth would possibly be hovering more in the range that we are seeing today, and we are not likely to see that go up considerably, all things being constant.”

“So, I think we've said that it will be around the current trend, what we have been seeing over the last few years.”

“is that in the coming financial year, we see that this is something which is, possible for us to deliver.”

“we are sitting on a project execution pipeline of next two to three years of stores that we will open and it takes as Anshul mentioned earlier, it takes varying amount of time based on complexity and the local micro-market dynamics.”

“internally we go for this 15% number. We plan our land acquisitions, the building of the real estate, the property, all of that on the basis this type of an internal number.”

“But our pipeline to build so many stores is strong, and we are confident in maintaining this over the coming years.”

“We made a conscious choice to double down on DMart Ready in 11 key cities where the vast majority of our online business comes from.”

“Avenue E-commerce, which is our online business for grocery, so the sales grew about 17%. EBITDA declined by about 43%, so we had a bigger EBITDA drain of 84 bps, and PBT was about 24% lower, at a net loss of INR307 crore.”

“Align Retail, which is the grocery packing business, grew about 16.5%, and PAT grew about 24%.”

“Avenue Food Plaza, which handles the fast and ready food business that we have in adjacency to each DMart store, grew about 35.5% and returned a PAT of 9%.”

“If the question is whether there is a plan to integrate AEL with ASL business, so there is no such plan.”

“No, there isn't. In fact, I would say that many of them in fact are doubling down.”

“In many cases, for example, we are the number one retailer for them as an individual entity.”

“So we don't see any big difference in terms of how foods and non-foods are playing out on account of GST.”

“No, so I think those stores, as we mentioned also, are doing much better versus the metro stores and the older stores.”

“So if I were to sort of just reflect on this, I don't see this going away, Garima.”

“Sales grew by close to 16%. Gross margin expanded by 16 bps.”

“Employee cost expanded by 27 bps due to the investment in service levels of the business, and other expenses declined by 9 bps, leading to EBITDA which was almost flat at about 7.85%.”

“From that perspective, we think the company can do much better in terms of volumes and turnover, and hence we are building the staff cost ahead of the curve, is how I will put it.”

“We are indeed seeing some inflation on account of the wage code and also general inflation, but the throughput increase at this point of time that we see from these stores is taking care of some of that.”

“But as Anshul mentioned, 15 out of 85 is not a very big number to distort the P&L widely.”

“The inventory days went up to 33.2. This is also due to more warehouses that we opened during the year so that we could better service our customers.”

“Total Debt inched up slightly to INR2,267 crores. This INR2,267 crores also includes debt arising out of AS 116 adjustment.”

“The actual debt, which is net borrowing on the company, is close to INR965 crores as of March 2026 end.”

“So that money is over now, and hence we are doing a fundraise.”

“So, our understanding is that our existing store count itself should be able to generate sufficient amount of capital that we need for expansion.”

“For some time, it could be in addition to the CPs that we are holding.”

“So, it gives us the flexibility to reduce the cost of borrowing through the NCD route and also gives us an opportunity to borrow for longer periods without the interest rate risk.”

“There are some pilots that we are doing in some of our stores with some fresh fruits, for example, in Mumbai, which is giving some strong results.”

“But, is there a plan to have a full-fledged fresh portfolio in DMart stores at this point of time? No.”

“And as far as my own leadership team is concerned, there are some natural progressions that would anyway happen as superannuation happens or some exits happen.”

“We will need to obviously build capabilities in the technology space that I've also called out. So we are looking at bringing in talent in that space as well.”

“This is my first call with all of you since formally stepping into the CEO and MD role.”

“And to support a much bigger footprint of DMart, we will be investing heavily in building management bandwidth and”

“In the quarter where we had the 13% growth, some of that was on account of the deflation that we had in our grocery business, staples business.”

“So, a combination of capacity, saturation, high throughput that we are already getting from these stores, plus competition is what to our mind is the reason for some of the large metros to slow down as far as same-store growth is concerned.”

“And so therefore, there could be some impact happening on account of that. And I'm suspecting that that's not going to change over the next few years.”

“It is just that typically the model that we have chosen takes a lot more time to build new stores.”

“No. We don't see that, to be honest, because again, as I've repeated earlier as well, that, in most of these smaller places, organized retail is even lesser than what you see in metros.”

“I think the quick commerce competition that at least we are seeing is still largely in, the large dense metros, which is where, possibly, our stores might be having some impact”

“So last year, we entered five new states, and we also hit the 500-store milestone.”

“We will be upgrading key systems so that we can run tighter operations and use our data, which we have a lot of, much more effectively across our categories, store operations, and supply chain.”

“We have a healthy growth reaching close to 40 crore bill cuts in the year gone by.”

“for-like store growth, which is stores more than two years old, grew about 8.1% for the last year.”

“We reported a turnover of close to INR67,000 crores in the year gone by. EBITDA margin came in at about 7.8%.”