“Without taking into account the stores opened over the past year, sales posted in December 2014 were similar with those of December 2013. Against the other months of the year, December sales are around 10% bigger. Overall, though, despite a competitive year, the trend of annual sales was a positive one,” say the representatives of Mega Image, Romania’s largest store chain, with over 400 supermarkets and convenience stores.
They add sales peaked on pre-holiday days, namely December 23, 24, 30 and 31.
For store networks, December comes to account for as much as 10%-15% of sales, but the percentage varies with each store format. Thus, December has the heaviest weight in sales for hypermarkets. For supermarkets and convenience stores, December sales can be just 10%-30% higher than on a normal month.
Camelia Popescu, communication and advertising manager at Cora, says the hypermarket chain’s results were balanced against last year, without providing further details.
The best-selling products during this period are foodstuffs, but sales of apparel, cosmetics and electrical home appliances also go up. Thus, for electroIT retailers the last month of the year comes to account for even as much as 30-35% in a whole year’s receipts.
While for food retailers December does not weigh as much, the month drives networks’ figures up.
“Last December was a good month in terms of sales, we registered a slight increase against December 2013. Also, against a normal month we can say we had 30% sales growth,” say the representatives of supermarket chain Billa.
For the network, the peak days were December 22 and 23 before Christmas and December 29 and 30. Sales peaked on these days, unlike in previous years, when preparations for Christmas were made a little earlier.
Profi representatives noticed the same tendency. They also say sales of fresh products rose significantly.
“Profi had followed an upward trend from the very start of the year, which maintained in December. We had positive figures both for the entire year, and December,” says Daniel Cirstea, general manager of Profi.
Carrefour representatives chose not to offer any details about sales growth in December, only stating the figures were better than those of December 2013, following the positive trend of the entire year.
According to ZF estimates, modern retail sales hit EUR800 million-EUR1 billion in December, in the context where the market is worth around EUR9 billion.
(English version by Catalina Apostoiu)