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French retailer Carrefour says its transformation plan is working and raises its ambitions. CEO Alexandre Bompard says their focus will be on customer satisfaction this year: convenience and e-commerce should make sure the numbers keep going upwards.
Cost cuts
Carrefour presented its full financial results this morning (after publishing the main figures on 23 January), focusing on the insight that the retailer’s big transformation plan ‘Carrefour 2022’ is in fact working. Net profit, ROI and cash flow are on the up, while the net debt has gone down by a billion to 2.6 billion euros by the end of 2019.
All this is enough reason to raise the ambitions: customer should be a more important index than ever before, and Bompard wants to raise the Net Promoter Score by 15 points in the next two years (after gaining another 8 points since the plan was launched). The company has managed to cut almost two billion euros in costs, but feels like it needs to continue in that direction. 300 million euros worth of non-strategic real estate will be sold as well.
Convenience and private labels
With particular pride, Carrefour reports the yearly rise in sales of organic products (+ 25 % since 2017), the expanded use of blockchain (for 28 products now) and the healthier recipes for 2300 private label products. Price positioning is improving and the non-food range is reduced and simplified, while hypermarkets are transformed substantially and food e-commerce grew by 30 % to 1.3 billion euros. The fastest growing physical stores are convenience concepts and hard discounters like Supeco and Atacadao.
The main focus for 2020 is clear: focusing on customer satisfaction, reducing the total surface of hypermarkets (cutting 350,000 sqm by 2022), further reducing and simplifying the product range (by 15 % this year), opening new convenience stores (+ 2700 by 2022) and lifting the sales of private labels to a third of total turnover by 2022. Carrefour needs to confirm its leadership in food transition for everybody and confirm (or even raise) all targets of the transition plan, its CEO states.
