Action's CEO sees growth opportunities in large cities

At present, Action has 198 stores in Belgium, but CEO Sander van der Laan still sees growth opportunities in the country. He wants to focus more on big cities and indoor shopping centres.

A store in every municipality of Brussels

Action wants to open its 200th store in Belgium this year. After all, there is still plenty of room for growth, assures van der Laan, who has been at the helm of the retail chain since 2015. The company has shifted its focus towards the big cities, such as Antwerp, Brussels and Charleroi. In addition, Action has recently opened new branches in shopping centres. “We wouldn’t have done that ten years ago”, the top executive tells Trends Tendances. “Besides, then, those shopping centres would not have taken us into consideration either.”

Action wants to be where the customers are. This entails, among other things, that the retail chain wants to be present in every municipality in the Brussels region. The retailer accepts this is more expensive and logistically complicated. “Since we already have almost 200 stores, it is time to establish ourselves closer to the city centres if we want to add a few more.” The fact that rent has fallen rapidly recently is obviously a windfall.

In total, Action wants to open 300 new sales outlets in nine countries this year. Due to the crisis, the rollout in Northern Italy and the Czech Republic got delayed, but “we are there now. And early next year, we will open our first Spanish store in Catalonia.” Most of the new outlets will therefore be mainly located in those countries. At the same time, the retailer will open a new distribution centre in Bratislava, which will be dedicated to supplying the Austrian and Czech branches.
 

Complementary webshop

Partly due to the Covid crisis, the discounter also took its first steps towards online. It started with click and collect and shopping by appointment during the second lockdown. Last month, Action even launched an actual webshop in the Netherlands, a pilot project featuring some of the more expensive items that can’t be found in the stores. While the average article price in the shop is 1.75 euros, online the products range from 20 to 50 euros.

For the time being, there aren’t any plans to sell the entire range online. “We think it makes more sense to offer a range that is complementary to that of the stores”, says the CEO. Whether there will be similar webshops in other countries has not yet been decided. “The project has just been launched, and we need to evaluate it first.”