New Tesco Lotus chief executive officer John Christie revealed his business philosophy of "growing together" via his first interview to the Thai media recently. He covered a number of topics, excerpted below.

Store expansion and growth

How many stores do you have now?

We had over 900 stores at the end of last year, 133 of them hypermarkets.

How many new stores will you open?

This year, we aim to increase our space by 135,000 square metres, which includes new store openings and store upgrades such as conversion of hypermarkets to Extras. We plan to convert at least five hypermarkets to Extras this year, for example, Bang Na and Navanakorn. Tesco Lotus results show 17-per-cent sales growth after Extra store conversion.

What is Tesco Lotus' sales growth target for 2012-13?

We will continue our growth momentum and hope to achieve a similar sales-growth rate as in the previous year.