As the largest retailer in Europe, the world's second largest retail chain group, and the founder of the hypermarket format, "Carrefour" may have never dreamed that one day, it would make headlines by "selling itself".
On the evening of June 23, Suning Tesco announced that Suning International, a wholly-owned subsidiary of the company, plans to invest 4.8 billion yuan to acquire 80% of Carrefour China shares. After the transaction is completed, Suning.com will become the controlling shareholder of Carrefour China, and the shareholding ratio of Carrefour Group will be reduced to 20%.
Carrefour, one of the two giants of global phone number list supermarkets alongside Wal-Mart, opened its first store in mainland China in Beijing in 1995, creating a precedent for foreign-owned supermarkets, and once led the Chinese market share champion for many years.
After the rapid expansion of store scale and the continuous growth of sales performance in the first decade of this century, international retail giants such as Carrefour and Wal-Mart began to encounter bottlenecks and encountered unprecedented encirclement and suppression. Domestic supermarkets represented by Yonghui and Wumart caught up and surpassed.
In 2007, foreign-owned supermarkets accounted for half of the top ten list of Chinese supermarket chains; ten years later, only Wal-Mart, Carrefour and Metro remained in the top ten list in 2017.