The French (Carrefour, Cora and Auchan) and the Germans (Real) made a fortune in Romania after building stores in the middle of Bucharest’s districts, with hundreds of thousands of people living within a two or three kilometer radius.
According to the information available on the market, the top-performing hypermarkets, that is Cora Lujerului, Auchan Titan and Carrefour Orhideea, each post over EUR100 million in sales every year, which can be regarded as “outstanding” on the local market, where a hypermarket has sales of EUR40 million a year on the average, as well as compared with Western markets.
Auchan officials have recently said that their store in Titan sees the highest traffic of all European hypermarkets, 30,000 to 45,000 people a day, second only to some hypermarkets in Russia and China. This hypermarket is also among the top performers in terms of sales, considering Auchan’s hypermarket divisions on twelve markets posted EUR61 million sales per store on the average last year (a total of EUR34.2 billion from 559 hypermarkets), while the store in Eastern Bucharest exceeds EUR100 million a year. Auchan has another hypermarket in Bucharest, in Militari, which is not doing as well, businesswise, because it is only kilometers away from Cora’s top performer, another over EUR100 million euro store.
“We can confirm Cora Lujerului has the highest sales and is the most profitable store in our network,” Cora officials told ZF. Cora has two more hypermarkets in Bucharest, in Pantelimon and in Berceni (Sun Plaza complex), which have yet to match the sales of the store in Militari.
The top performer of market leader Carrefour Romania’s network is the store in the Grozavesti-Orhideea area, close to student dormitories, which has kept its position over the years despite the works on the Basarab overpass that made the area difficult to reach and subsequently caused customer numbers to go down. The second top-performer in Carrefour’s network is the store in the Baneasa project, which is close to reaching the EUR100 million mark.
As for Germany’s Real, which operates four hypermarkets in Bucharest, the store with the highest sales is the hypermarket in Vitan, with “the store in Cotroceni Park catching up fast,” retail market sources say. Real posted the lowest sales per hypermarket of all the networks on the market, about EUR28 million last year.
(English version by Loredana Frățilă-Cristescu)