Hypermarket networks are adding around 16 stores this year, from the 27 launched last year. Retail park or mall developers' financing problems, as well as the consumer spending slowdown have put a brake on expansion.
After having pumped almost 1bn euros in network development in the past two years, hypermarket operators in 2009 will only open 16 stores and make cumulated investments of 212-248m euros, according to the data centralised by ZF.
Carrefour, Kaufland and Real are the biggest investors in food retail this year, too, but expansion plans are below the ones companies planned before the emergence of economic downturn effects.
For instance, Carrefour in the first half of 2008 announced it planned to step up network development to an annual pace of seven openings, to 40 hypermarkets in 2012. A total number of three or four stores will be opened in 2009, though, with the gap little likely to be covered next year as nobody is counting on a consumer spending revival next year.
Real, a unit of Germany's Metro group, also planned to open six or seven stores this year, but as the delivery of shopping centre and retail parks in which it owns spaces has been postponed to yearend, only four stores will be opened.
In Romania, Real has the same medium-term expansion target as Carrefour: 40 hypermarkets by 2013. Will the two rivals attain it?
"During crisis times, there are factors that are also easing up retail network development - the drop in land and construction supplies prices, but fundamentals should also be taken into account, with consumer spending decline as the most important. In the first half of 2010, I do not see a significant consumer spending revival, so that in 2010 hypermarket network expansion should be in line with this year's," says Ionut Pascu, project manager of Roland Berger Strategy Consultants Romania.
Another retailer with ambitious expansion plans is Kaufland, operated by Germany's LIDL & Schwartz. It will hit the target it announced at the moment it entered the market, 50 stores, next year, but the 150m-euro loan contracted from the EBRD for expansion plans in Romania and Bulgaria strengthens the fact that it plans to expand further after 2010. Kaufland is also the first hypermarket chain also tackling smaller cities.
"In big cities, hypermarkets no longer have such a high potential because of the tightening competition," Pascu says. Still, Bucharest will witness the biggest number of hypermarket openings in 2009.
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