Put Carrefour in your Basket – strong sale figures for Q4
Carrefour announced strong sales figures for the fourth quarter and it is expecting a further 6-8% sales growth in 2008 and operating profit growth above that range. And that is excluding acquisitions – the retailer just bought a 75% stake in PT Alfa Retailandon in Indonesia for $72m!
On the grounds of this success, the French Goliath, which has almost 15,000 stores worldwide, is also planning to spin off its property (real estate) into a publicly traded company.
Despite the fact that the food retailer’s group sales rose as much as 7% last year, to almost 92.3 billion euros (£68.93 billions), the French food retailer, is still cautious about the consumer.
Carrefour’s management has very wisely decided to postpone the real estate IPO given the current market turmoil and stays open to alternatives. In my opinion, it is worth keeping on eye on the company’s next moves…
On a more detailed basis:
- 4th quarter sales rose 1.8%
- 4th quarter turnover rose 10%
- sales up by 4% in France
- 3.4% in ROE
- 2.9% in Asia
- and by- an outstanding- 10% in Latin America.
January 28th, 2008 at 7:42 pm
Carrefour always enjoys publicity through various ways, positive but also negative. A few months ago, Dell announced their approval to Carrefour to shelf its notebooks and desktop PCs to three locations in the European region.
It was around the same period when the French retail giant had apologised after three customers where rambled upon in China and faced fatal wounds. Carrefour was fined 500,000 Yuan.