As Europe's largest retailer, the world's second largest retail chain group, the pioneer of hypermarket business, "Carrefour" may not have dreamed that one day, they will be "sold" in the way of the headlines.
On the evening of June 23, Suning Tesco announced that Suning International, a wholly owned subsidiary of the company, intends to invest RMB 4.8 billion to acquire 80% shares of Carrefour China. After the completion of the transaction, Suning Tesco will become the controlling shareholder of Carrefour China, and Carrefour Group's shareholding dropped to 20%.
As one of the two giants of global superstores alongside Wal-Mart, Carrefour landed its first mainland store in Beijing in 1995, creating a precedent for foreign-funded superstores, and once led China's market share championship for many years.
In the first decade of this century, after the rapid expansion of store size and continuous growth in sales, international retail giants such as Carrefour and Wal-Mart began to hit a bottleneck and encountered unprecedented siege, while their "students" - to Yonghui, Wumi, represented by domestic supermarkets to catch up and overtake. The domestic supermarkets represented by Wing Fai and Wumart are catching up and surpassing them.
In 2007, foreign supermarkets accounted for half of China's top 10 supermarket chains; ten years later, only Walmart, Carrefour and Metro were left in the top 10 list in 2017.
Along the decades of planned economy, in the early days of reform and opening up still dominate people's daily lives, and the past "three feet counter" is different, at that time, the Friendship Store mall dedicated a corner to provide customers with self-selecting and self-sorting goods, the goods sold are mostly imported high-grade goods.
On the day of the opening of the Friendship Store Supermarket, Guangzhou people flocked to the store and stepped over the threshold, even though they knew that they needed foreign exchange coupons to purchase items and many of them could only look at them but not buy them, it was hard to stop the enthusiasm of the public.
The sales volume of the Friendship Store at that time was incomparable to that of today's self-selecting malls. Often the products were sold out just before they were put on the shelves, and they were out of stock while they were being restocked. This kind of "self-selecting" supermarket became the trend at that time, and it was also the first time for many Guangzhou people to know luxury goods and contact with high-class department stores.
At that time, customers have not yet developed the habit of shopping in the supermarket, often open the package at will, or unpaid directly taste, and even frequent theft, the supermarket was not good for theft prevention, high rate of loss of goods, and had to close down.
In 1984, Beijing's first supermarket, the Four Seasons Green Vegetable Self-Selection Market, opened in Zhongguancun, Haidian. This is the country's first vegetable supermarket, mainly engaged in self-selected vegetables, non-staple foods, etc., but soon after the opening of many problems were exposed, when the self-selected shopping malls copied the foreign marketing model, vegetables, non-staple foods, etc., packaging sales, so that the loss of the price advantage, and at that time, people are not used to go to the supermarket to buy food, relying only on the sale of vegetables is difficult to sustain. Less than a year, the supermarket loss amounted to 23 million yuan.
Early self-selecting malls are inevitably not well adapted to the local environment, but this new way of shopping has quietly entered the lives of Chinese people. Here there is no traditional "three feet counter", customers can personally buy goods from the shelves, and then go out to pay the checkout. Influenced by this, supermarkets are springing up all over the country.
1984 Shanghai Cereals, Oils and Foodstuffs Self-Selection Mall opened, this mall has a business area of more than 400 square meters, has been the largest supermarket in Shanghai at that time, is also one of the earliest supermarkets in Shanghai.
The policy support opened the first wave of foreign-funded superstores' layout in China.
In 1999, Frenchman Shi Rongle was transferred from Taiwan market to Carrefour to fight in mainland China, and in the seven years of its tenure, Carrefour opened 81 stores in total. Especially in the three years from 2003 to 2006, the number of Carrefour stores increased by 16 per year, and the number of new stores in the period of 2004-2010 reached 141, which is more than three times the number of stores opened in the previous nine years, and the coverage of the area was also expanded from 14 provinces and regions before 2004 to 23 provinces. For a long time, Carrefour has been the largest foreign retailer in China in terms of the number of stores, and has become a real hypermarket giant in the Chinese market.
Carrefour, as the first pioneer of hypermarket business, has conquered Chinese consumers and opened the door to a new world for the first group of Chinese retailers at the same time. The industry was learning from Carrefour and started to poach Carrefour's managers. Carrefour was known as the "Whampoa Military Academy" of the retail industry.
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