January 10 (SeeNews) - CM Balkans, the exclusive franchisee of French retailer Carrefour in Southeast Europe (SEE), eyes Serbia as the next step in its expansion in the region and plans to launch a new store format in Bulgaria, CMB Bulgaria’s head said.
CM Balkans operates across SEE via different companies in every country, namely CMB Bulgaria, CMB Albania and CMB Balkans Skopje.
“Serbia may become a key market for CMB Bulgaria alongside Bulgaria,” the executive director of CMB Bulgaria, Christian Charitat, told SeeNews in a recent interview.
“The strategy that we applied in Bulgaria can be applied in Serbia," Charitat said, adding that the company will step on the Serbian market with a hypermarket in Belgrade.
In Albania, where the first Carrefour hypermarket opened in November 2011 in the capital Tirana, the company plans to follow up with a second one shortly, he added.
In Bulgaria, the springboard for its expansion in the region, the company plans to open next year three hypermarkets in Sofia and between eight to ten supermarkets in total nationwide, retaining its focus on the big cities.
Currently, Carrefour is present in the six largest Bulgarian cities - Sofia, Plovdiv, Varna, Burgas, Ruse and Stara Zagora, operating a total of eight hypermarkets and as many supermarkets.
The first Carrefour hypermarket in the country opened in March 2009 in Burgas while the latest, in Stara Zagora, was launched at the end of December 2012.
In 2013, the retailer does not plan to add new cities to its footprint in Bulgaria.
“The expansion plan has been kept up. We are totally on schedule. No change to our plans has been made following the deal for the joint venture with Marinopoulos Group,” Charitat said.
In August 2012, Carrefour Group exited Carrefour Marinopoulos – a 50/50 joint venture with Greece's Marinopoulos Group, which then became the French retailer's exclusive franchisee in Southeast Europe.
Charitat would not quote a figure for the company’s market share in Bulgaria, saying figures vary from source to source. “Let us say more or less today we rank fifth in Bulgaria and our objective is to be first or second.”
Carrefour’s main rivals on the local market are Germany's Kaufland and Lidl.
The company is considering the possibility of adding shortly a new format to its operations in Bulgaria.
“The hypermarket is the core of our business, but we have a portfolio of different formats. So far, we have two in Bulgaria – hypermarket and supermarket, but I really do believe that two is not enough. Soon you will see a newborn Carrefour format in Bulgaria,” Charitat said. “This is the answer to the change of the market, the change of the environment.”
Flexibility with formats is key to a retailer's survival, according to Charitat.
“Retailers are now focused on pricing but that is not enough. You need to be flexible with formats, to be ready to respond quickly. The winner will be the one ready to react immediately, to adjust the format and go into action – that is the recipe for success.”
The two formats - the supermarket, whose popularity in all markets is growing, and the hypermarket, should be combined as e-commerce too is a factor to be considered, he said.
"Demand is changing. We need to adapt. If you don’t push ahead, if you don’t develop every day, you regress. Innovation is the key."
The change in consumer demand will be accompanied by consolidation and the entry of new players on all markets of Southeast Europe, Charitat predicted.
“In the whole region we can see change coming,” he said. "Some retailers are going to live on, some are going to disappear. The landscape is going to change in all the countries, not only in Bulgaria. New players are coming.”
Apart from Bulgaria, CM Balkans is also present in Macedonia, where the first Carrefour hypermarket opened in the beginning of October 2012.
"The Carrefour Skopje City Mall hypermarket is performing amazingly, it is a real success," Charitat said.
A total of 496,000 transactions were registered in the hypermarket by the end of 2012, meaning that visitors were double or triple this number, i.e. some 1.0-1.5 million.
Asked about the company's expansion plans in Macedonia, the official said: "We are still at the stage of assumptions, we believe there is room for another hypermarket in Skopje, as well as for a supermarket, in another city in Macedonia as well."