December is the last chance for retailers to improve revenue for the year and considering the consumer-spending decline in the first few months of 2011, this month is even more important.
Philippe Lejeune, who has been running Belgian-French retailer Cora for about a decade, says that sales in December account for 10% of the total sales of the year.
Cora’s sales stood at EUR327.8 million in 2010 and this year’s estimates point to a slight increase, so that sales in December should reach EUR33 to EUR35 million, according to ZF’s calculations. These calculations are based on last year’s sales, this year’s estimate and the share of December sales in the total.
Lejeune says that most Romanians buy toys and food, and chocolate is the best-selling product in the food department.
Toys are among the best-selling products in December, both because of Christmas and because Saint Nicholas is celebrated on December 6th and Romanian children usually get candy and toys the night before.
Cora’s hypermarket in the Sun Plaza mall in Bucharest, for instance, saw sales up 37% in the first four days of the month compared with the same interval last year, said the representatives of the network that has eight stores in Romania.
Discount retailer Lidl’s best selling products were foods.
“Lidl is a food retailer, which is why our customers were mainly interested in foods at this time before the winter holidays.”
The representatives of the German-held retailer, which has 129 stores in Romania, said that the company also sold toys in its stores.
Lidl bought the Plus discount store networks in Romania and Bulgaria from Tengelmann in 2010.
Foods were also the best-selling products of Profi.
“Overall sales in the first few days of December, however, were not as good as last year,” Profi officials said.
As for French retailer Carrefour, “sales in the first days of December were the same as last year” says Andreea Mihai, the retailer’s marketing manager.
With over EUR1 billion in sales in 2010, the company operated 70 stores on the hypermarket, supermarket and convenience store markets. The retailer had a special toy catalog prepared for the holidays.
German-held rival real,- bet on toys in December, too.
“We paid special attention to toys this year and allocated ample space to them. Moreover, the offer was built so as to meet all needs regardless of the budget allocated,” says Mirela Surghie, head of media at real,-.
(English version by Loredana Fratila-Cristescu)