The distributor Auchan, a brand in the Mulliez galaxy, is preparing to present a large-scale social plan project to its employee representatives on Tuesday, threatening around 2,300 jobs in France, AFP learned on Monday from a source close to the matter. , confirming information from “La Lettre”.
Staff representatives from several entities of the northern group were summoned on Tuesday at 9 a.m. to CSEs in the Lille region, for an “update on the situation of the company and its projects”, and the unions fear bad news on the front of employment, according to this source. The management of the Auchan group, contacted by AFP, did not wish to comment.
According to the source close to the matter previously mentioned, around 2,300 jobs could be threatened at different levels of the company, which employs around 54,000 employees in France. Some of the jobs would be threatened at the level of support functions within the various headquarters, another part at the store level.
Auchan Retail had already announced in September 2020 the elimination of 1,475 positions in France, after a voluntary departure plan of more than 500 positions in January of the same year. The pioneer of the hypermarket format has had a series of difficult economic years and its holding company Elo announced in July a net loss of almost a billion euros over the first six months of 2024.
In 2023, Elo – which employed 155,000 people worldwide as of September 30 of that year, including 64,400 in France – had published a net loss of 379 million euros and sales down 1.7 %, to 32.9 billion euros, while inflation had boosted the sales of most of its competitors.
In France, Auchan is the fifth distributor with just over 9% of the market, far from the leading trio E.Leclerc (24.1%), Carrefour (21.4%) and Mousquetaires/Intermarché (17.4%) and behind Coopérative U (12.2%), according to the Kantar institute.
Auchan recently joined forces with its competitors Intermarché and Casino to pool purchases of foodstuffs then sold on the shelves of their stores, for an unusually long period of ten years.
This pooling has aroused the concern of trade union organizations, as has the announced objective of reducing the commercial surface area of around a third of Auchan hypermarkets “in all its European countries”, i.e. ultimately an “average reduction of 25% of sales areas”.
