Vishal Mega Mart Limited CC-Mar25.pdf · 2025-04-30
Sure. Thank you very much for both the questions , t hey are great. Firstly, on the 80-bps improvement in gross margin, I will tell you three or four reasons which have contributed to this. The first and the obvious one is that our business is growing well, r esulting in greater leverage with us in terms of sourcing and buying. So that's an important component of what's led to that margin improvement. Secondly, as I mentioned slightly earlier, and you also alluded to that, the private label contribution has gone up by 135 bps over last year and that has also contributed to improvement in gross margin. Lastly, as we spok e earlier, we are always trying to move customers from the lower price points to hig her price points, and that is a continuous process. So that shift of a certain number of customers to higher price points h as further led to an improvement of gross margins. So these three factors put together add up to 80 bp s, and that's the improvement in the gross margin. So. your second question was that, in view of the fact that our private brands are making great progress, are we looking for reducing the discount at which we are selling these brands vis-à-vis national leaders? Not immediately as yet, because you see, there are two factors which go into the pricing of private brands. One of course is , as you mentioned, the discount over the market leaders and so on. Secondly, our goal is also to drive penetration in these categories which still have no penetration. And one element of pricing is completely focused on seeing what is the price point at which they will become affordable for a significantly large number of consumers and customers. So. it's a combination of these two. It's too early for us to claim that we have driven penetration to or saturated any of these categories in any significant way. So we are not really looking at reducing the discount just as yet.
Firstly, our same store sales growth, just minor correction, is 12.3% for the full year, for Quarter 4 it is 13.7% (Note: these are adjusted SSSG) . Secondly, our growth across all our three businesses is pretty similar and in the same ballpark. And lastly, you will be happy to know that we have not seen any significant divergences of growth between East, Northe ast, South and West. Of course, there are minor and insignificant differences, but nothing which is significant. They have all grown at the same ballpark.