[:en]Indian coffee chain Cafe Coffee Day is to open 150 cafes and 120 Xpress outlets across the country this year.

The new outlets will expand its existing Indian network of more than 1500 cafes and over 900 Xpress outlets, which caters mainly for people on the go.

“Going by the (current) demand, there is potential for 5000 cafes in India. One measure to assessing this potential is the number of malls in India – there are 800 malls in the country and each mall can ideally take one cafe. Similarly, every residential area, high street, mass transit location, etc can have cafes,” said CEO Venu Madhav.

The expansion is aimed at increasing its competitiveness from rivals such as Starbucks plans to open “thousands of stores” across India in the “not-too-distant” future.

CCD targets to achieve 18-20 per cent growth in revenue during this fiscal year.