Fashion
While their simultaneity is just a coincidence, the two recent buzzes about the famous Belgian Westvleteren beer were destined to strengthen each other. On the one hand, leading beer review website RateBeer announced that the Westvleteren 12 had returned to the top spot in the “World's best beer” ranking. On the other hand, Westvleteren announced it would temporarily break with its traditions and export 420,000 bottles of the very same beer to eight countries.
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Fashion
Georges Plassat is Carrefour's new CEO. An extraordinary meeting on Sunday evening finally confirmed the rumours that the world's second largest distributor would let go its Swedish CEO Lars Olofsson. Plassat will become Carrefour's new chairman starting 8 March.
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Fashion
Swiss retail group Migros recorded a turnover of 24.815 billion Swiss francs (slightly over € 20 billion) last year, which is a decrease of 0.9% compared to 2010. Its retail turnover went down by 0.7% to € 17.4 billion, even though customer frequency was up 0.2%. The group blames the bad economic situation in Switzerland, pointing out that its “real growth was 2.1%” as average prices went down by 2.8%.
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Fashion
Delhaize released disappointing figures for the fourth quarter of 2011 today, bringing the complete results for the year down as well. The group has announced to close 146 stores (in South-eastern Europe and the US, not in Belgium), thereby axing an estimated 5000 jobs.
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Fashion
British supermarket chain Morrisons has announced disappointing Christmas sales results. Despite the fact that the number of customers rose by 800,000 (+4.8%) per week, like-for-like sales went only up 0.7%; far worse than Reuters' analysts had expected (+1.3%) and a steep decrease from the third quarter's +2.4%.
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Fashion
According to a specialised website, Metro Group has opened the first two stores of a new Ukranian chain of convenience stores last December, in order to increase sales to small-scale wholesale companies, which currently account for 40% of the group's joint turnover.
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Fashion
The Auchan group has announced its acquisition of the seven Hungarian Cora hypermarkets and attached shopping centres from the Belgian Louis Delhaize Group. If the Hungarian authorities allow the deal, the hypermarkets will change hands for an undisclosed amount in the beginning of 2012.
The move comes as a surprise, as last month the Hungarian CBA chain openly stated it was aiming to buy the Coras and Louis Delhaize's other Hungarian chains Match (121 stores) and Profi (73 stores). CBA was eager to buy the three chains in order to pass Tesco as market leader in Hungary.
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Fashion
British retail chain Morrisons is planning to open hundreds of “M Local” convenience stores in the next few years, following the success of its first 280 m² trial shop in Ilkley, Yorkshire. The new strategy aims at avoiding the bloody price war in the middle of the (super)market and could well be a smart strategy in these difficult times.
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