Indian retailer Bharti Enterprises has revealed that its recently launched convenience chain, Easy Day, has proved a hit amongst consumers as it looks to expand its presence in the national market alongside Wal-Mart, its US partner.

Speaking at Reuter's Consumer and Retail Summit, the group's managing director Rajan Bharti Mittal said that the format had been 'well received', with more stores set to be launches over the coming months.

'It's early days for me to predict anything, but if I look at the last 60 days, the sales tell me that the customers are enjoying the experience,' he told the summit.

The new stores will be supported by Bharti's new 7,400m2 distribution centre in Punjab state, with a plans afoot for a further centre further north to be opened in 2009.

Mr Mittal added that the Punjab distribution centre could support 200-300 store of varying size, although he would not determine the total number of stores that would be supported by it. 'If we chose to expand, we have enough land to do that,' he said.

Wal-Mart will continue to provide logistical and distributional support to the retailer as it follows through with plans to invest approximately US$2.5bn in small format stores, supermarkets and hypermarkets by 2015, according to Reuters.

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