There is still room for development and analysts and executives on the market are talking about a total of 3,500 modern stores in Romania in the next five to seven years.
The development of modern retail in urban and rural areas is driving traditional retailers out of business, though.
Profi will be the expansion champion in Romania for the third year in a row and will open about two thirds of the new stores planned for 2017. Second most aggressive expansion will be Mega Image’s, 50 to 60 new stores.
“Our target is 200 new stores for this year. We have an investment budget of about EUR50 million, which will mainly go towards network expansion and logistics development,” Daniel Cirstea, the Romanian who has been running the store chain for about two years, recently said.
Most new stores opened in 2017 will be small format stores – supermarkets and convenience stores, so they will require several hundred thousand euros or EUR1 million to EUR2 million investment each.
Kaufland, the retail sector leader in Romania, will make the biggest investments in 2017. The company has more than 110 hypermarkets in the country and plans to add five to seven this year. Its annual investment budget is about EUR110 million, the company has previously said, which is about one third of the amount retailers will invest in Romania in 2017.
(English version by Loredana Fratila-Cristescu)