Cora bets on smaller stores, too

Cora, the French chain that owns the biggest hypermarkets on the Romanian market, has resumed expansion this year, betting on a strategy similar to Carrefour’s: smaller stores and partnerships with shopping centre developers. The retailer announces a target of 10 new stores over the next four years.
The company will open two 4,500 square-metre hypermarkets in Baia Mare and Constanța in the last quarter of the year following an investment of 5 million euros per store.The resizing of the store format could allow the retailer that brought the biggest hypermarket (15,000 square metres) onto the Romanian market to tap into medium-sized Romanian cities with less competition, as well as to increase sales per square metre.”Tapping into cities with less than 200,000-300,000 inhabitants is an opportunity to test this new hypermarket format. We plan to open ten new stores over the next four years, but not necessarily stores with smaller sales areas, as is the case of the Gold Plaza Baia Mare and Constanța City Park stores,” said Philippe Lejeune, general manager of Cora Romania. He added that the opening of stores that are 2-3 times smaller than the chain’s average store size has been dictated by the availability of retail space on the market.