Carrefour Will Be Stationed In About 100 Cities In The Next 3 Years.

After 18 months of brewing, Carrefour will finally usher in the biggest reform in China in 20 years. Carrefour held a small media conference in Shanghai headquarters in March 5th, announcing Carrefour China's low-key strategy for over a year and a half.

"We now have 238 hypermarkets in more than 70 cities in China, with 60 thousand employees and about 20 million members. Our goal is to move to some 100 cities in China in the next 3 years. At the meeting, Tang Jianian spoke with great interest. "To accomplish this goal, we have formulated three new directions for the development of the Chinese region, that is, the expansion of the main stores must be extended to more new cities, especially three or four line potential cities. Although everyone is saying that the market is going down, I think there are still opportunities for many new markets. The second is to develop the new format of Carrefour Easy convenience store. At present, there is only one store in Shanghai. Our testing results are good. We will expand the convenience stores in Shanghai and other first tier cities in the future, and then expand in the country. Our convenience store is situated between standard supermarkets and convenience stores, with additional services such as meals, which is different from general convenience stores. The third direction is about to start our electricity supplier. "

10 years ago, the industry grew by nearly 30%, but in the past three or four years, the word "growth rate is the lowest in history" has frequently appeared in the analysis of major business reports. According to the data released by China chain operation association, the growth rate of large scale supermarkets and supermarkets in 2013 was only 7.8%.

As a leader in the Chinese market. Fast food products Retail giants, Carrefour's move to change seems to have slowed down a bit.

In recent years, Carrefour has taken the lead of "the Chinese godfather of a big store" to stick to the format of big stores that encounter many forms of impact and consumption changes. When most of its retail competitors such as WAL-MART embrace e-commerce, they are faced with many doubts.

Carrefour Group, WAL-MART's main competitor in the world, won the approval of the Ministry of Commerce of China in August 2012 to approve the acquisition of the No. 1 store of electric business enterprises, thus successfully laying out the electricity supplier field. In addition, companies such as Huarun group, China's fastest selling retailing company, have already implemented changes to cope with the weakening trend of stores.

Faced with many challenges, the reason why Carrefour tardy is probably because of its lack of logistics supply chain system.

Earlier, in order to speed up the strategic layout of its competitors in China, Carrefour broke the conventional centralized procurement management system, and adopted the "decentralization" management mode of single shop decentralization and manager responsibility system, giving the stores great power, so that each store had an independent procurement and sales system, and the logistics cost was very low, making Carrefour the "fastest leader" of the fastest growing foreign retailers in China.

Although Carrefour has won the development time and consumers' favor, and behind the rapid development, it has created an opportunity for procurement corruption.

With the decentralization of procurement entering the bottleneck period, it was agreed that convenient and flexible procurement methods were difficult to prevent the breeding of corruption. Combined with the monopoly of regional procurement, some products with high gross profit and high interest rate were hard to enter the hypermarket.

Tang Jianian announced that Carrefour will fully implement the new procurement and logistics organization structure, that is, the current 24 CCU (city commodity procurement center) in the country will be merged into 6 large regional purchasing centers, and the purchasing centers are located in Shenyang, Beijing, Shanghai, Wuhan, Chengdu and Guangzhou. The 6 purchasing centers correspond and belong to 6 regions of northeast, North China, East China, central China, West China and Southern China in Carrefour.

This means that after 20 years in China, Carrefour started a revolution from the backend of "commodity procurement", the main wheel of the retail industry, to drive the whole business of the company to undergo tremendous changes.

In simple terms, Carrefour China will implement the separation of procurement and store management operations. Previously, the CCU City procurement center system in China for 20 years will once again "centralize". The newly established 6 regional procurement centers will undertake the merchandising rights of Carrefour, which has been scattered in 24 cities throughout the country, while the 6 heads will no longer be responsible for commodity procurement but only devote themselves to store operation management.

"Of course we have noticed the personnel problem. There will be many new jobs in the merger process. We need 3000 new employees at the moment, so we have no intention to lay off all the staff involved in the adjustment, and they can adjust to the new jobs. This year we will also promote 15 regional long management staff, about 75% of whom are Chinese employees. Tang Jianian revealed.

For such a family Traditional retail giants Opening up new business battlefields also means changing management ideas.

"First of all, goods, online and offline products must be different, and in marketing, we must pay attention to online characteristics, such as pictures to highlight the details. But the entity business lacks the concept of electricity supplier operation, usually simply and brutally on a Zhang Quanjing chart, which is very affecting sales volume. The most fundamental problem is the cost of distribution. The selling price of supermarkets is very low, sometimes. Distribution cost It is also higher than the selling price, selling a single loss a single, which is also the main reason why Auchan and others once suspended the electricity business. Moreover, unlike overseas electricity suppliers, the same price of entity stores, and the need to charge for delivery, the price war in China's electricity market is serious. Almost all businesses are free to mail and deliver goods to win competitors. This has increased the distribution cost of the entity business transformation providers. " A senior veteran who had worked in a foreign retail business pointed out. "If it's an ordinary retailer, it's already late to do business, but as a retail giant, Carrefour still has a chance. However, foreign enterprises in China will inevitably encounter problems of not being acclimatized. O2O industry analyst Huang Yuanpu told the new financial reporter.

At the same time, for Carrefour, the electricity supplier platform is not only a hypermarket, but also a new convenience store mode, Carrefour Easy, which joined the Carrefour business in China in the second half of last year. Data show that in 2013, China's retail industry continued to suffer from the slowdown of economic growth, the overall growth rate of department stores was 9.6%, the growth rate of large scale supermarkets and supermarkets was 7.8%, while that of convenience stores increased by 15. The sales growth rate of 15 main representative enterprises was 18.2%, far higher than that of other formats.

For the location of Carrefour Easy, Carrefour will still expand its scope in large cities, because "big cities have large population flow and high consumption price per passenger list, and the aging situation in big cities is more obvious." Tang Jianian said that the difference between the neighbourhood format and the hypermarket model is closer to the community and more convenient. Although Carrefour Easy was opened in the second half of last year, Carrefour hopes to implement more and open more stores in the future.