Dedeman’s network currently numbers 27 stores and its sales stood at EUR476 million last year. The profit margin ranged from 8% to 13% between 2006 and 2010. The company plans to open four or five more stores on its home market and then focus on markets in the region.
“We will travel to the countries in the region, such as Bulgaria, Turkey, the former Yugoslavia and maybe Greece, to check things out for ourselves in the second half of the year,” Dragos Paval, the manager and majority shareholder of Dedeman told ZF.
The largest DIY networks in these countries are Praktiker (the market leader in Bulgaria and Greece in 2010), BauMax (23 stores in Slovenia, Croatia, Bulgaria and Turkey) and Koctas, market leader in Turkey, with 36 stores.
“We have a series of surveys of the markets in these countries but they are two years old. We need to see what happened in the meantime, how they developed in the last couple of years. Based on comparative analyses and considering the potential of the markets we will decide what country to go to first,” Dragos Paval said.
(English version by Loredana Fratila-Cristescu)