Romania, one of Europe's poorest countries with the prospect of EU membership dangling far-off in 2007, may not appear the first choice for investors quick to make an easy euro.
But international supermarket chains have moved into the eastern European nation, and could invest more than a billion euros over the next four years -- to the delight of Romanian shoppers.
Despite their low purchasing power, Romanians increasingly prefer to shop in megastores and spend on average 40 to 50 euros (US$50 to US$60) on each visit, Dragos Rosca, an analyst at Roland Berger Strategy Consultants, said, adding it was about the same as in many EU countries.
Romania, he argued, has "plenty of potential for growth and the market will not be saturated for another four or five years."
Under Communism, the Romanians suffered through years of privation, but discovered an unimagined cornucopia of products in the new stores that began to spring up after the fall of the dictatorial regime of Nicolae Ceausescu.
The German group Metro was the first to open a superstore in 1996. Today about 40 megastores serve the population of nearly 22 million.
Last year, they took 20 percent of the retail market, a proportion that was set to grow strongly in coming years, according to a study by the GfK consulting firm.
"When we decided to set up in Romania, it was more on an instinctive feeling than as the result of a market study. If we had based our decision on studies, we never would have come," said Jean-Michel Arlaud, the head of Hyparlo, a franchise operation of the French Carrefour group.
But Carrefour has never looked back. Sales at its first megastore exceeded expectations by a factor of three. Arlaud last month inaugurated the group's third vast supermarket, and Carrefour intends to open two new stores a year, including another two in Bucharest and one in each of 15 cities with more than 200,000 inhabitants, according to Carrefour's executive director for Romania, Francois Oliver.
The group has already invested 100 million euros and plans to quadruple this figure by 2010.
The optimism is just as heady over at the rival Cora, the flagship of the Franco-Belgian Delhaize group. It opened its first megastore in Bucharest last October, and plans to open 14 more for a total investment of 500 million euros.
The German Metro and Rewe groups already have about 30 large stores for a total investment of 300 million euros, and say they won't stop there. Two other German distributors, Tengelmann and Kaufland, have also announced their intention to open stores in Romania this year.
The director of Cora in Bucharest, Regis Mougel, says the success of the stores is due to their excellent price-quality ratio, as well as the diversity of goods on offer.
But the newspaper Adevarul had a different explanation. Since Romania will not become a member of the EU until at least 2007, "Romanians go to megastores not only to do their shopping but also to discover a part of the West," it said.
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