Jumbo starts 2024 looking at “how it is meant to be”

Jumbo calls 2023 “a year with two faces”. It was a year of transition for the Dutch runner-up, in which sales grew slower than the market and market share consequently fell.

“Being Very Frugal”

The Jumbo group ended its financial year 2023 with 11.02 billion euros in sales, up 7.3 % from the 10.28 billion a year earlier. At the eponymous chain, sales grew 7.1 % to 10.89 billion euros, but due to high inflation this was less than the average market growth. A year ago, Jumbo had a market share of 22 % in the Netherlands, now this has dropped slightly to 21 %.

The supermarket chain says it needs to make its business strategy sharper: the “Seven Certainties” were dropped, while CEO Ton van Veen is looking for a more distinctive image. “Under the banner ‘Jumbo as Jumbo is meant to be’, we are returning to our basics. We are doing this based on the master plans for the Jumbo formula left by our founder Karel van Eerd”, Van Veen explains. However, he remains silent about what exactly “is meant to be”.

“Being Very Frugal” is one of those basic values, due to an increasing pressure on the earnings model as costs continued to rise. Profitability was under severe pressure last year, Jumbo admits. Next year, purchasing partnerships with Everest and Epic Partners should yield economies of scale, but Van Veen also wants to deploy advertiser platform Jumbo Retail Media and market anonymised customer data. “There is a lot of potential in that”, the CEO believes.

Seven minus one in Belgium

Jumbo added thirteen stores to its tally last year, reaching 725 at the end of 2023, thanks to the acquisition of ten former Jan Linders supermarkets. Belgium did get seven new Jumbo stores, but the Zonhoven supermarket closed in April due to too much competition. Adding a net of six stores, the chain now has 33 Belgian stores. Eight more locations are reportedly planned for 2024, including Jumbo’s first Foodmarkt (XL format) in Ghent. The supermarket chain now aims to open its fiftieth store in Belgium by the end of 2025.

Online sales now account for about 7 % of total sales, but profits remain flat. However, the retailer sees potential in customers shopping both in-store and digitally and in its delivery subscription. Restaurant chain La Place added 133 million to the group sales figures, an increase of 24 %. Jumbo admits that 1 % of its turnover is also lost to theft. From January, the company will therefore test a more intensive camera surveillance and other measures.