"We aim to set up more than 200 new stores of varying sizes across India over the next three years," said Mr. Ashok Maheswari, managing director, HomeCare Retail Pvt Ltd. "Oracle Retail applications will help us roll out a dynamic, standardized and integrated IT infrastructure, resulting in greater efficiencies in our storefront operations as well as better supply chain and vendor management."

HomeCare plans to invest more than INR 3000 million over the next three years to set up Magnet and other branded stores in several Indian cities. The retailer will set up supercentres, hypermarkets, supermarkets and specialty chain stores with a fully integrated supply chain, which will include captive organic food farms. The company was looking for a retail software solution that could support the current operations using global retail best practices as well as scale-up to support all future expansion plans. HomeCare chose Oracle Retail after assessing competitive offerings, including software from SAP.

"Increasing affluence and urbanisation of the Indian population is driving rapid growth in retail. Both established domestic players and entrepreneurial new entrants are gearing up to capture the India retail dollar and the winners will be those who adopt globally proven, scaleable business models. Oracle Retail is uniquely positioned to deliver on the needs of HomeCare today, with the flexibility to meet their future needs", said Mr. Ronan Gilhawley, Asia Pacific vice president for Oracle Retail. "We are pleased that HomeCare have invested to secure their future growth through our merchandising platform, joining the group of more than 1,900 global retail leaders who use Oracle applications to run their business critical processes".

According to a research conducted by HomeCare in 2006 in Western India, the buying pattern of consumers (with an average purchase basket size of 16-18 items) differ up to 40 per cent in two stores that are located eight kilometres apart. As a result of this finding, HomeCare's retail stores are located in clusters of three or four stores where one large stores is the hub and two or three smaller stores are clustered around it, all located within a six kilometre radius. All stores in a cluster share a common supply chain. Oracle Retail will help these clustered Magnet stores capture consumer buying patterns in their respective localities, analyse these, create inventory forecasts and generate automatic templates for purchase orders along with a distribution list in each store cluster.

HomeCare will implement Oracle Retail Merchandising System, Oracle Retail Store Inventory Management, Oracle Retail Sales Audit, Oracle Retail Invoice Matching, Oracle Retail Price Management, Warehouse Management, Allocation, and Retail Data Warehouse from the Oracle Retail Suite.

About Homecare Retail & Magnet
Magnet is a national retail brand promoted by Homecare Retail Marts (P) Ltd. The first Magnet store was successfully started in October 2005 and was the biggest hypermarket in Mumbai spread over 57000 sq fts carpet area in Dadar Matunga (W). Magnet stores are large format stores covering approximately 60,000 sq ft area. Already operating in Mumbai and Pune, Magnet stores will expand to Ahmedabad and Bangalore following the hub and spoke model before end of 2007, and thereafter across other metro and mini-metro cities very rapidly.

About Oracle Retail
Oracle is the number one provider of innovative and comprehensive industry software solutions for retailers - enabling organizations to serve their customers better by applying insight into daily business decisions for more profitable results. With software that provides supply chain, operations, merchandising, store systems, optimization and information technology solutions, Oracle partners with the world's leading retail companies, including 17 of the top 20 retailers worldwide, to transform the economics of their businesses.

About Oracle
Oracle (NASDAQ: ORCL) is the world's largest enterprise software company. For more information about Oracle, please visit our Web site at http://www.oracle.com