Mumbai: Uniqlo India aims to touch Rs 1,000-crore sales mark in the current fiscal year, continuing with its 30 per cent annual growth journey, helped by retail expansion, its Chief Operating Officer Kenji Inoue said here on Thursday. Besides Uniqlo India is also increasing local sourcing, aiming to source 18 per cent from local production by 2025, from 15.5 per cent currently.
India is an “important” market for the parent entity — Fast Retailing Co. which recently reported an annual sales of 3 trillion yen (nearly USD 20 billion) and now aiming to triple it to 10 trillion yen in future.
“We have been achieving 30 per cent growth, we feel that the potential of the market is huge. We at Fast Retailing just achieved 3 trillion yen sales and we are now targeting 10 trillion yen, which is three times, and definitely, this market would be one of the very important markets to (achieve) that,” Inoue told PTI.
Though India is still a small market on a global scale for Uniqlo, its potential “is probably one of the biggest” and it will change in the future, he added.
Uniqlo, which opened its first store in October 2019 in India, currently operates a network of 13 stores here.
It is opening a new store in Mumbai at Phoenix Palladium on Friday and one more in West Delhi next week, taking the total count to 15 by the end of November.
Moreover, within three years of operations in India, Uniqlo had become profitable in FY’22.
Uniqlo India Pvt Ltd has reported a 31 per cent increase in revenue to Rs 814.84 crore and a 25 per cent increase in total profit to Rs 85.17 crore for the financial year ended March 31, 2024, according to a RoC filing.
“We have grown 30 per cent last year (FY’24) and we are targeting a similar growth ratio. We have not seen any significant drop or any change in people’s consumption behaviour. We have been seeing strong growth,” said Inoue who is also a CFO of Uniqlo India.
When asked whether Uniqlo India will touch the Rs 1,000-crore sales mark this fiscal, Inoue said “We aim for that. It would be dependent on factors such as the opening of new stores such as Phoenix Palladium, which is an interesting step towards our expansion.”
Inoue further noted that “we commit to expansion and modernisation of production activities in India and are on track to achieve local sourcing requirements. We are producing global standard goods in India. Right now, the local production ratio is 15.5 per cent. We are aiming to achieve 18 per cent by 2025”.
On its retail expansion, in the Southern region, he said, “South India, is really important, but we want to ensure that the quality of the service that we provide in each of the stores, or the product mix that we have in each of the regions meet the customer demands.”
Besides offline, the company gets 15 per cent of its sales from its official online store UNIQLO.com, through which it serves 17,000 pincodes. The company will keep focusing on its online sales through its mobile application and website.
Uniqlo is a brand of Fast Retailing Co, headquartered in Tokyo, Japan. It is the largest of eight brands in the Fast Retailing Group, the others being GU, Theory, PLST, Comptoir des Cotonniers, Princesse tam.tam, J Brand and Helmut Lang.
