New players, more stores or longer opening hours for the stores of the players on the market are the elements that were supposed to make a difference between the 2003 Christmas holidays and the similar season in 2002. A new element adds up to all this in the first few days of 2004: the Romanians' appetite for shopping, which did not go down in the beginning of the new year, as it was the case in the past. Those that stood the most to gain were the merchants quick enough to react and restock the shelves stormed by buyers in the last few days of 2003.
"Our stores were closed in the first two days of 2004, but since the third day when we reopened, traffic has kept at high levels, above the same time last year," Andreea Mihai, Carrefour Romania marketing manager said. She added the return of consumers from holiday trips was one of the reasons.
"Besides those that came back from holidays, the bad weather forecast by specialists made some Romanians take advantage of their last days off and stock up on more food than usual," Mihai added.
The representatives of the Selgros Cash & Carry network in their turn say the Romanians are more interested in shopping at this time. "I for one have seen a larger number of people in our stores, but we have to wait for January results to come in first before confirming or denying a growth in terms of client frequency and current sales from last year," Pia Kraus, Selgros Cash & Carry marketing manager explained.
The new trend is therefore adding up to the best period the "new breed" of merchants in Romania had in the last few months of 2003.
"We had a very busy time in the last few months of 2003. We opened no less than four stores in Q4 and had all nine stores running round-the-clock for more than ten days before Christmas," said Delia Nica, PR manager with Metro Cash & Carry, a company estimating 700 million euro sales for last year, up approximately 50 million euros from 2002.
Almost all store chains announced higher sales for this winter season compared with the previous one, due to both the higher number of stores they operated, as well as to the improvement of the yield of those already in place.
"We've had two operational hypermarkets this winter compared to one a year ago. Under the circumstances, it was only natural for sales to be higher than the year before," Carrefour's official said, without going into details about the actual growth percentage.
Some companies got their first taste of a shopping season in
Romania. The officials of Cora, which operates a 16,000 sqm hypermarket in the Granitul Pantelimon area in Bucharest, say the results this winter are beyond their estimates. ionut.bonoiu@zf.ro
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