Uninor, the Indian telecom subsidiary of Telenor, has opened 367 retail shops in one day.
This 1-day record took Uninor, a regional telecom operator in India, 75 days of planning and 5400 hours of execution involving 200 retail employees covering 150,000 customers in its six operating circles.
With the new addition, the number of Uninor retail shops would increase to 1480 stores from 1,100.
Uninor says it already has the second highest number of retail stores among all operators in its six circles.
Last week, Vodafone, one of the main rivals of Uninor, said the telecom company will have 150 Vodafone branded large format stores focused in the urban areas to provide a higher level of service to small businesses and consumers.
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Retail expansion is part of Uninor strategy to expand its mass market distribution to Indian mobile users who have alternative options such as Bharti Airtel, Vodafone, Reliance Communications, Tata Docomo, Idea Cellular, MTS, Videocon, Aircel, BSNL, MTNL, etc.
With its 1,480 exclusive stores, Uninor provides the facility for any subscriber to meet an executive and get all services on the spot. For this, Uninor has areas that currently don’t have a store within a radius of 5 km for a subscriber base of 10,000 customers.
It was estimated that it needed to open over 360 stores to fill the gap. However, an expansion of this scale would’ve required at least 2 years.
“As Uninor expands its network, the retail expansion will help us serve the mass market consumers better, and provide them with even better quality service in the future,” said Rajeev Sethi, CMO at Uninor.
Earlier, Uninor announce an investment of Rs 500 crore to expand its network and distribution infrastructure by 30 percent in its six operational circles. Uninor is also in the process of re-deploying 5,000 sites from closed down circles for geographical expansion.
