Each Kaufland store in Romania posted EUR19.3 million sales on average last year, double as much as in Czech Republic and Poland, ZF has found from Deloitte data and market information.
Deloitte’s Central Europe Top 500 report shows that Kaufland’s sales stood at more than EUR2 billion on the three markets – Romania, Czech Republic and Poland, varying slightly from country to country. The differences in the number of stores are greater, however, as the retailer has about 220 hypermarkets in Poland, some 185 in the Czech Republic and had 107 in Romania at the end of 2015.
Kaufland operates on seven markets – Germany (its home market), Poland, Czech Republic, Slovakia, Bulgaria, Croatia and Romania. Its biggest market is Germany by far, with about EUR14 billion sales a year, according to the latest data available to ZF. Second biggest market is Poland, which is also the biggest in the region, followed by Romania, less than EUR100 million behind.
Kaufland’s Romanian sales went up nearly 15% last year, almost double the growth rate on other markets, driven by expansion and the rise in overall consumer spending. Its 2015 sales therefore stood at more than EUR2 billion, which made it the first retailer in the country to overshoot the mark.
It will continue expansion this year and over the coming years, because the average modern retail space per 1,000 people is smaller in Romania than in the Czech Republic, Poland and Hungary. Still, this is precisely why Kaufland saw double sales per store compared with these countries, whose economies are more developed than Romania’s and people earn twice as much as Romanians do.
(English version by Loredana Fratila-Cristescu)