Pantaloon Retail (India), the country’s largest retailer by size, is looking to speed up expansion owing to an improvement in consumer sentiment and higher growth in same-store sales, industry analysts said.

The company has raised its space expansion target to 3-4-million sq ft per year, from around 2-million sq ft earlier, they said.

However, Kishore Biyani, managing director, Pantaloon Retail, presented a more conservative growth estimate. “We are looking to add 2.5-3.5-million sq ft of retail space per year. The expansion across value and lifestyle formats will be simultaneous,” he said.

In FY09 and FY10, the company added 1.7-million sq ft and 1.5-million sq ft of space, respectively.

The retailer ended FY10 with a total retail space of 13.5-million sq ft.

Arnab Mitra, an analyst with IIFL, the institutional equities division of India Infoline Ltd, in a note to clients this week wrote that almost the entire expansion in retail space would be in the value (Big Bazaar, Food Bazaar) and lifestyle (Pantaloons, Central etc) format. “The value format, would accounts for over 60 per cent of space addition. Pantaloon is unlikely to focus on home retailing,” the analyst wrote.