The developer of the Colosseum retail park completed the Carrefour store in record time, considering it was still working on the structure of the building four months ago.
The project has two powerful anchors, Carrefour and Leroy Merlin, which are among the largest companies in the world in their respective industries, in an area where there is hardly any competition, but also not as high a population density as in other areas of the city.
While Leroy Merlin will be fighting over customers with Austrian-held bauMax, which has a store only several hundred meters away, Carrefour Chitila’s competition will be its stores in Baneasa (northern Bucharest), Chiajna (Militari, western Bucharest) and Orhideea (central Bucharest), each of which about ten kilometers away or a 10 to 15 minute drive via the beltway or the Basarab overpass.
This will be Carrefour’s eighth hypermarket in Bucharest, with the French company providing the best coverage in this regard in the city, for which reason the stores are fighting each other over customers. Whereas the Orhideea and Baneasa hypermarkets are seeing about EUR100 million annual sales each, which makes them Carrefour’s top performers in Romania, the store in Militari, the first in its local network has been suffering as a result of the opening of Cora and Auchan on the Iuliu Maniu Boulevard (the district’s thoroughfare).
(English version by Loredana Fratila-Cristescu)