The Hindu Business Line : Adesh Gupta new Liberty Shoes CEO

His appointment comes at a time when over Rs 350-crore Liberty Group, which is celebrating the Golden Jubilee of its existence, is on a restructuring and consolidation mode to transform itself into focused entities. Mr Gupta was hitherto a director in LSL.

"It took us 50 years to become a significant player in the Indian footwear industry, but we are confident that a dominant position will be achieved by us in retailing in the next two years", Mr Gupta said here today.

The CEO, who represents the second generation of the promoter family, indicated that the third generation that is right now pursuing academic activities, would enter the business in the next two to ten years.

LSL, which claims to have a capacity to manufacture more than 50,000 pairs of footwear a day, hopes to close the current fiscal with a turnover of Rs 225 crore. It also plans to increase its ad-spend in the ensuing fiscal by about 50 per cent from a level of about Rs 10 crore.

`Revolutions' stores: Liberty Retail Revolutions Ltd (LRRL), a company set up recently with dominant shareholding by Liberty Shoes for retailing its branded products, hopes to register a turnover of about Rs 75 crore in 2006 - the first year in which all the 24 `Revolutions' stores are expected to be fully operational.

The stores would also retail high-end fashion accessories including watches, sunglasses and travel goods.

Besides the 24 `Revolutions' stores in the country, which would be company owned and managed, LRRL also plans to establish similar stores (one each) in Singapore, Colombo, Dhaka and Dubai by March 2006.

The first store is to be opened at Malad in Mumbai in the next fortnight. "After the Malad store, we will open `Revolutions' stores in Chennai, Hyderabad, Kolkata, Nariman Point in Mumbai and one in Gurgaon in the coming months", Mr Gupta said.

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