August 20 (SeeNews) - SPAR Hrvatska, part of Austrian food retail group SPAR, said it has opened a new supermarket in the Adriatic town of Rijeka in Croatia.
"Being already present in Rijeka with three SPAR supermarkets and two INTERSPAR hypermarkets, today we opened our sixth store in the town," SPAR Hrvatska CEO Helmut Fenzl was quoted as saying in a company statement on August 16 upon the store launch.
It is the 113th SPAR store in Croatia, the statement said.
It has an area of 1,470 square metres in the Marti shopping centre and employs 35 people.
SPAR entered Croatia in 2005 with the opening of the first INTERSPAR hypermarket in the Adriatic city of Zadar. It introduced the supermarket store format in 2009 with the opening of the first SPAR supermarket in the northern city of Varazdin.
Later on, its retail network was boosted by the purchase of 20 stores from Zagreb-based peer Diona in 2015 and the acquisition of the Billa business operations in Croatia in 2017.
According to information of the Croatian competition agency, AZTN, SPAR Hrvatska recorded the highest nominal increase in retail turnover in 2018, climbing one place to become the fourth largest retailer in Croatia in terms of market share, thanks to the fact that some forty of the former Billa outlets were in business during the whole of 2018.
The top three Croatian retailers last year in terms of market share, were Konzum, the local unit of Lidl (part of Germany’s Schwarz Group) and local retailer Plodine.
Spar Hrvatska is wholly-owned by SPAR Osterreichische Warenhandels-AG, i.e. Spar Austria, and employs more than 3,000 people.