Media-Saturn to withdraw from China?

Joint
venture with Foxconn

According to
Reuters, Metro will be withdrawing from China just two years after
launching in the country, although their anonymous sources stress that these are still
just rumours and nothing is official yet.

Europe’s
biggest electronics retailer runs seven Media-Saturn stores in China
in a joint venture with Foxconn Technology. At the beginning of the
project, the German company was aiming for a hundred locations by
2015, but in October 2012 their CEO Olaf Koch had to admit that the
Chinese market appeared to be a bigger challenge than expected. The
seven original locations are rumoured to have made a loss of forty
million euro in 2012.

“Missed
opportunities”

This Chinese
adventure has been a sore spot for some time and it saw a low point
when German billionaire Erich Kellerhals revoked his support for it
last November. Kellerhals isn’t just anybody: he is the founder of
Media Markt and still owns 21% of its shares.

Kellerhals
has been on a collision course with Olaf Koch of Metro, which owns
about 75% of the shares of Media-Saturn, accusing them of not having
a real strategy of only thinking about cutbacks. In an earlier
interview he described Olaf Koch as someone “who knows about
finances, but who is clueless about selling.”

Kellerhals
mainly resents Koch for Metro AG missing the opportunity of taking
over a Chinese competitor with more than a hundred locations: “With
that we would instantly have created a strong foundation and a
notable relevance on the Chinese market”, he still believes.