“We will open new stores in Deva and Bistrita in the spring of 2019. The stores will take up 1,400 square meters and the investment in a single store will amount to some EUR180,000. We also want to open in Arad, Satu Mare, Galati, Braila, Ramnicu Valcea, Timisoara, Cluj and Bucharest, but do not have plans for how many to open a year. We are in talks at the moment,” Gwenn Hervo said.
The new store in the Veranda Mall takes up 1,800 square meters and sells more than 5,000 items for more than 60 sports and also has a 600-square meter space for testing.
As online orders have been on the rise, Decathlon is working on a project to open order pick-up points, called Click and Collect or smaller stores that take up 50 to 300 square meters, Gwenn Hervo said. Such Click and Collects and smaller stores will be located in office building areas, such as Pipera and Floreasca. Online sales have risen by 50% in the past two years, hence the plan to enable customers to pick up their online orders, the Decathlon official added.
The French group, which arrived in Romania in 2009 when it opened a store in the Militari Shopping Center in Bucharest, posted EU165 million revenue last year. The officials of the company did not answer revenue questions but said sales during winter months generate 60% of Decathlon Romania’s revenue.
(English version by Loredana Fratila-Cristescu)