Carrefour makes profit thanks to Brazil and Belgium

Europe (minus Belgium) struggling

In France, still worth more than 45% of company
sales, sales dropped another 0.7%. There is one bright spot for the plagued
distributor: a status quo in comparable sales (-0.1%).

The French supermarkets hold firm (status quo),
but the hypermarkets again lose 2.1% on a comparable basis. The convenience
stores and other formats of the company are faring well in home country France:
+4.9% in sales (even though their sales – a bit under one billion euro –
remains peanuts compared to the five billion of the hypermarkets and the 3.17
billion of supermarkets).

In the rest of Europe the company of CEO George
Plassat loses 2.6%: the biggest drops are in Spain (-5.1%) and Italy (-5.7%).
Belgium as the largest growth (+3.6%), but that country is too small to have
any significance for the entirety of the European results.

Viva Brazil!

The fact that Carrefour still grows in the past
quarters, is almost completely due to Latin America (+14%). In Brazil sales
grew organically with 13.3% and in Argentina with 16.5%, but the devaluation of
the Brazilian real and the Argentinian peso causes some trouble for the
company.

In China sales rose by 2.4% thanks to the opening of new stores, but on a comparable basis there was a drop of 2.3%.

More than 10,000 shops

The company from Boulogne-Billancourt has
reported 144 new openings in the past quarter, mainly in Latin-America and
Europe excluding France. At the same time Carrefour closed 102 shops, most of
them in Europe excluding France.

With 42 shops extra the company has reached
10,000 locations (of which 4,732 in France and 4,038 in the rest of Europe). All shops
together amount to a shopping surface of just under 16 million sqm.