Carrefour group uses the Market brand for its supermarket division, with each store format operated under a different brand. Carrefour is for hypermarkets, while franchised convenience stores operate as Express (urban areas) and Contact (rural areas).
Carrefour announced takeover of Billa Romania operations in an almost EUR100 million deal at the end of December 2015. The move took Carrefour to almost 8 billion lei (EUR1.77 billion) sales and about 275 stores under various formats.
“There will be 14,700 people in this new organization. There will be 14,700 jobs. We’ll do everything in our power to offer a job for each of the 14,700 people,” said Jean Baptiste Dernoncourt, general manager of Carrefour Romania.
The company will change, there will be new things to do, new opportunities and this means it needs all the talent and all the people it can have, he added.
This is the first statement of the French executive following the approval of the Carrefour-Billa deal by the Competition Council.
Carrefour may operate Billa stores under their old name for 18 months from the date of the deal and will then rebrand them as Carrefour Market, Dernoncourt said, without revealing how much Carrefour was planning to invest in the process, which also entails changes of interior design and the range of products carried. The process should cost several million euros, according to ZF’s estimates, as Billa stores total 83,000 square meters.
There will not be any changes to how things are run in the first three months. Carrefour will work with the Billa team to figure out the processes, systems and the way things are organized, the Carrefour official said.
The Billa-Carrefour deal received approval on condition Carrefour keep certain promises. The competition watchdog found the deal would take Carrefour’s market share in Braila beyond the reference level the Competition Council uses when assessing such deals. Carrefour and Billa had six of the 19 modern retail stores in the city, so the former proposed selling three of them to receive approval. The stores will continue under a new operator, Jean Baptiste Dernoncourt said. (EUR1=RON4.5164)
(English version by Loredana Fratila-Cristescu)