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Carrefour unveils plans to increase local market share

Carrefour Taiwan, the nation's largest hypermarket chain in terms of sales, said yesterday that it hoped to secure a market share of 50 percent this year by opening new stores, remodeling older outlets and maintaining a low-price strategy to expand its customer base.

"We are planning to open four more new stores, which is equivalent to the sum of new outlets to be opened by our competitors, and remodel five old outlets this year," Carrefour Taiwan's general manager Marc Oursin told reporters yesterday.

Growth

The chain, which operates 34 outlets nationwide, expects to see single-digit growth in sales this year from NT$50 billion (US$1.62 billion) last year, Oursin said.

Since 2003, Carrefour Taiwan has spent hundreds of millions of NT dollars to upgrade 18 conventional outlets to shopping malls.

This resulted in both revenues and shopper traffic increasing by between 5 percent and 15 percent at the 18 renovated stores, although it would take three to six years for the investment to break even, Oursin said.

Carrefour hopes to extend its market share to more than 50 percent of the nation's NT$120 billion hypermarket sector by the end of this year, up from a market share of 47 percent last year, company spokesman Allan Tien (田中玉) said.

Outlets

The retailer operates three types of outlets in Taiwan: conventional hypermarkets with a sales area of around 1,500 ping; hypermarket shopping malls with integrated food courts covering around 2,500 ping; and large hypermarket complexes it calls "commercial towns" covering more than 3,000 ping in alliance with different retailers, such as home-appliance seller B&Q, and other service providers like spa centers.

Carrefour plans to open two more "commercial town" complexes next year, Oursin said.

The company decided earlier this year to spend NT$1 billion to enable it to provide constant price cuts ranging from 2 percent to 5 percent on selected commodities like bottled water, cooking oil, paper tissues and diapers, as well as occasional discount promotions for electronic products like plasma-screen televisions, he said.

Carrefour said it hoped a series of innovations will help to set it apart from its rivals and help secure its leading status in the nation's 16-year-old mature hypermarket sector.
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