They are negotiating with a Bulgarian chain, they will not build hypermarkets
The French chain “Carrefour” is expanding in Serbia, Bulgaria and North Macedonia, intending to start opening its stores at the beginning of 2025 at the latest, Serbian media reported.
“24 hours” ago, Retail&More – part of the AVE group of Nikos Vardinoyannis, confirmed this and specified that
negotiations are underway with a Bulgarian retail chain,
whose stores to purchase or co-operate with it.
“We were negotiating as a franchisee to give rights to Parkmart Holding and ALDO for Bulgaria. We even opened a site this year in the building of the Center for Trade and Industry. But recently we have been negotiating with another chain, whose name I cannot name, at least until we finish the talks”, said the legal advisor of the Greek company Prof. Ioannis Kalamaris. And he added that the negotiations are going well so far and it is likely that they will end very soon.
In Bulgaria, we are talking about two of the brands of the French “Carrefour” – “Carrefour Express”, which operate in stores with a maximum area of 500 square meters, and “Carrefour Market”, which are located in premises of about 1,200 square meters. The store in TSUM, for example, is 800 square meters and is called “Carrefour Market”
“Carrefour” entered the Bulgarian market for the first time in 2009, and even then the holder of the rights over the brand was a Greek company – “Marinopoulos”. But then the shops
were of the hypermarket type,
with the largest located in the malls and their area was several thousand square meters.
In 2016, however, the Greek company lost the rights, the stores operated under the brand until February 2017, when they gradually stopped paying suppliers and the Bulgarian company went bankrupt.
During the negotiations with “Parkmart Holding”, the intention was to rebrand around 25 stores with the “Carrefour” brand by the end of 2024. However, now there is a slight delay in the opening of objects with the logo of the French brand. It is not known if there is any plan as to how many stores there should be, but given the fact that we are talking about small sites, it will probably be a hundred.
“Carrefour” is a brand that is known for a fairly large number of products under its own brand or
made in France
In the store in TSUM, for example, there are about 8,000 products, of which 300 bear the Carrefour logo, and the delicatessen products are mostly imported from France.
Carrefour is not a typical discounter, but it often runs promotions where prices drop to very low levels, often lower than typical discounters sell. About 50% of its own brands are from the organic food category.