What a year it has been for Lulu Group International. In the past six months alone, the retail giant best known for hypermarkets has announced four new shopping malls in the UAE and India, expanded to the US and revealed a huge expansion programme for Indonesia, not to mention its usual new openings across the GCC.
In the UAE, the Abu Dhabi-based group will invest $545m to develop Mall of Umm Al Quwain, due to open by the end of the year, Avenues Mall – Sharjah, due to open in 2018, and Avenues Mall – Dubai Silicon Oasis, to open in the first quarter of 2019.
The project in India includes a shopping centre, hotel and convention centre in the capital of Kerala and is expected to be the country’s largest mall.
The group revealed in January a $500m expansion programme in Indonesia, where it opened its first hypermarket last year. It will add another ten hypermarkets and department stores in the next three years.
In February, it opened its 133rd hypermarket, following new outlets in countries including Saudi Arabia, the UAE, Qatar and Oman in just the past few months. Lulu Group also has signed a memorandum of understanding with the Malaysian government, with the intent to build hypermarkets there.
Y International, a subsidiary of the group, opened its first food processing and logistics centre in the US. The export centre will purchase, process, re-label and export a variety of supermarket products made in the US. It expects its staff numbers to more than double within a year.
It is no wonder that Deloitte ranked Lulu Group the top retailer in the Middle East and 27th in a list of the world’s fastest growing retailers released in January. The group now rakes in retail revenue of $6.2bn annually across its operations in nine countries.
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