BUSINESSMAN Lucio Co is further expanding its membership shopping S&R, which caters to the upper scale of the market, doubling its store count in less than five years as it prepares to open its 10th store in the country by year-end.
Anthony Sy, S&R president, said the company remains committed to opening as many as two stores within a year, while boosting the brand by opening pizza parlors under the same name.
At that pace, the company could double its store count in half the time it spent in rolling out stores organically, Sy said.
“Five years ago, we set our first five-year plan, which said we will open one store per year. So, from four stores we became nine. Now we’re at our next five-year plan. Now we’re looking at one to two stores a year, depending on the availability of property. So, we will continue to grow our S&R brands,” Sy said.
Sy said its 10th store will be located in Nuvali, where the company will open a store size that has 5,000 square meters (sq m) to 6,000 sq m of selling space on a 20,000-sq-m property.
S&R is folded under Puregold Price Club Inc.
Puregold, the flagship grocery store chain of Lucio Co, can expand at a much faster pace of at least 25 stores or more per year as it can acquire stand-alone grocery chains, such as those of Eunilane and Parco, and rebrand these as Puregold.
S&R, however, has to grow organically, or build stores and its market from the ground up, as it virtually has no competitor.
Sy said that by the end of the year, S&R will have 36,000 sq m in net selling area.
Each S&R store costs between P500 million and P600 million to build. Co is allocating P1 billion as capital expenditures for S&R alone.
As of the first quarter of the year, Puregold grocery stores accounted for about 82 percent of the company’s sales and the rest from membership shopping.
S&R, however, has net margins of 10.4 percent or more than twice as much as Puregold’s 4 percent.
Its quick-service restaurant under the same S&R brand also has about nine branches, which include its newly opened branch in UP Town Center in Quezon City.