“Sales are a little below the initial budget,” Lund told ZF.
The Austrian-held retailer opened its only store in Romania in the West Park retail park in western Bucharest in 2008, taking up 27,000 square meters.
The company spent EUR31 million to open the store, whose best-selling products are sofas.
Kika posted 46 million lei (EUR10.6 million) revenue and RON10 million loss in 2011; it had 117 employees, according to the Finance Ministry website.
Despite talk of expansion on the Romanian market in Constanta, where construction of a store was supposed to begin in 2011 and Bucharest, where kika officials said they were in talks to buy land, Lars Lund stated, “nothing has been finalized yet”.
Last spring he said that the management of the retailer was busy opening stores in Croatia and Czech Republic and remodeling existing ones in Austria, which was one of the reasons why development in Romania had been put on the back burner. (EUR1=RON4.3573)
(English version by Loredana Fratila-Cristescu)