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He's India's rajah of retail, the man who would be king of the malls and bazaars. Kishore Biyani is on a hell- for-leather expansion spree, opening a new store every two days - and sometimes more.
"I don't have time for all the store openings any longer,"
he says almost regretfully.
Biyani is on a shopping spree of almost maniacal proportions. Six months ago he had 160 stores. Today that's up to 320 and the numbers are climbing. He aims to keep up the relentless growth for the foreseeable future and by 2010-2011 hopes to straddle the Indian retail sector with almost 3300 supermarkets, department stores, an electronics chain and even bookshops.
What's Biyani trying to do? To put it bluntly, he's dreaming about becoming the Indian version of Sam Walton (Wal-Mart), Simon Marks (Marks & Spencer) and Harry Gordon Selfridge (Selfridges) all rolled into one.
If that's not enough, he's reaching out for much more _ his Future Group is building malls and testing the water in financial services.
Biyani's rise to retail stardom is an extraordinary story of a maverick player who proudly says that he has always thrived by breaking the rules and who rose almost from nowhere.
"How do I keep track of my empire? It's easy. By observation. I use my family and also my staff. I love feedback and my company allows criticism. I believe in dissent," he says.
Now aged 46, Biyani might be considered a bit young to write his autobiography. But he isn't letting that stop him and his life story It Happened in India has just been released.
The book has a print run of 200,000 (a huge number for the Indian market).
At the launch, Biyani picked up a copy, studied it with a shopkeeper's eye and closed in on the 99 rupees ($3.20) price sticker. "It's a good price point," he said happily.
Biyani was an early bird in the Great Indian Bazaar. He was quick to realise that it was only a matter of time before organised retailers began muscling into the highly disorganised and fragmented sector which is dominated by "mom and pop" stores. He read everything on retail he could lay his hands on including Kmart's Ten Deadly Sins: How Incompetence Tainted an American Icon.
He started back in 1987 with a shop that sold trousers (his department stores are still called Pantaloon) and then later branched out into supermarkets. His Big Bazaar supermarket chains are low-price havens with constant "Sabse Sastha" - cheaper than anyone else - offers.
The result is they are always crowded and Biyani likes it that way. "Who would go into a store if it didn't look crowded?" he asks.
But, contradictory though it may sound, there's a big question mark over Biyani's empire. Is he really the king of the Indian marketplace, the master of all he surveys? For the time being he's outselling his biggest competitors by a huge margin but they are threatening to outspend and outshop him in coming years.
The competition includes the biggest and richest names in India's corporate world.
The petroleum-to-petrochemicals Reliance Group, for instance, made its debut four months ago and has been opening several small neighbourhood supermarkets every week.
Reliance is vowing to spend about $5 billion or more in the next five years to turn itself into a retail giant.
Then there's local telecom heavyweight Bharti Group, which went through an extensive courtship with Tesco but finally tied the knot with the biggest giant on the block - Wal-Mart. Bharti's hoping to throw open its supermarket doors to customers in the next few months.
Others entering the retail fray include the mighty auto and steel to software Tata Group, which has linked up with Australia's Woolworths and commodities czar Kumar Birla.
Then there's the Calcutta-based Spencer's Group, which is also opening scores of stores in the coming months.Biyani doesn't underestimate the competition but he's sanguine about it.
"The competition is on paper. It's at least two years away."
But that shouldn't be interpreted as resting on his laurels. Biyani has raised cash and he's using it to stay several steps ahead of his rivals.
Currently Biyani's Future Group has about 464,500sq m of shop space but he expects to double that by next May.
By 2010-2011, he's aiming to have a gigantic 2.8 million sq m. His turnover has quadrupled in the past two years and should soon be closing in on $1 billion. Biyani is in 40 cities and hopes to take that to 90 by 2011.
But even those numbers don't capture the scale of Biyani's ambitions. He has, for instance, just opened a sprawling 11,600sq m warehouse-style mega-store called Home Town (on the lines of Britain's Home Base or the US Home Depot) and plans to have several more operating in coming months.
On a smaller scale, there's bookstore chain Depot and Brand Factory which is an Indian version of a "dollar store".
There are even others such as ALL, which specialises in oversized clothes and Urban Yoga, a chain that will sell yoga outfits.
Also, he has a tie-up with a company that's acting as a franchisee for foreign retailers such as Marks & Spencer, Etam and Next.
But Biyani's biggest talent is in reaching out to the value-driven customer and he doesn't forget that for a moment.
It also fits with his lifestyle, which is frugal in extreme. "I read a lot of books, I spend time with my family. I don't spend a lot on what is seen as visibly expensive."
His mass approach to selling certainly seems to work. His executives still haven't forgotten the day when their Big Bazaar supermarket chain announced a special sale and the queues stretched for blocks at stores. In Bangalore one outlet had to be shut after a mini-riot broke out.
Biyani's reaction to that overly successful discount sale was instructive.
He sent executives to Tirupati Temple in south India - which draws tens of thousands of people daily - to study crowd management techniques.
Will Biyani sell out to the giants who are just opening shop? That's always a possibility but he dismisses it airily.
"This is the simple story of a dukandaar [shopkeeper]," says his daughter in the foreword to his book. The book itself isn't a masterpiece but the story of Kishore Biyani and how he helped to lay the foundation of modern retail in India is a saga that has only just begun.
