Carrefour officially acquires Cora and Match stores

Retail giant Carrefour announced on Monday 1^is July officially buy from the Belgian group Louis Delhaize the Cora stores, which will be transferred under the Carrefour banner, as well as the Match stores, which will keep theirs.

The group said in a statement that it had “finalized today the acquisition of the Cora and Match brands in France”as well as their purchasing center Provera. The transaction is carried out on the basis of an enterprise value of 1.05 billion euros.

Louis Delhaize owned 60 Cora hypermarkets and 115 Match supermarkets, often located in the north-eastern quarter of France. According to Carrefour, they represent around 2.4% of the highly competitive food retail market and employ 22,000 people.

This acquisition, “the most important for Carrefour since the takeover of Promodès » in 1999, said Alexandre Bompard, the group’s chairman and CEO, to consolidate its second place behind E.Leclerc, which holds almost a quarter of the market, and to remain ahead of Les Mousquetaires/Intermarché, which bought many stores from the struggling Casino group.

Carrefour announced in mid-June that it had obtained a waiver from the Competition Authority to carry out this acquisition without waiting for its decision on the operation, which was expected “by the end of the first quarter of 2025” according to Carrefour. The distributor estimates “limited competition issues” because of “the strong geographical complementarity of the two groups” a you “profit from the operation” pour ” the consumer “.

Cora must “benefit from a new lease of life”

During a telephone press briefing on Monday, Alexandre Bompard clarified that“from October each Cora store will change its brand” will lower prices “at least 10% on nearly 3,000 products” sold. A figure to be compared with the number of references sold in hypermarkets – between 20,000 and 35,000.

In a letter to new employees seen by Agence France-Presse on Monday, Mr. Bompard explains that Cora must “benefit from a new lease of life” while Match, which will retain its brand, “will keep its singularity”. The project will be presented to the social partners “in the next few days”he writes again.

Asked by the press about the possibility of the acquired stores being switched to franchises or lease-management, store operating methods that are popular with the distributor but criticized by its unions, Alexandre Bompard replied that the acquired stores “will be developed at this stage in an integrated manner”.

Carrefour specified that it would increase the “potential for synergies” of the operation, now considering a “additional contribution to EBITDA (gross operating surplus) of 130 million euros” per year “by 2027”compared to 110 million previously. “Half of these synergies will be generated by an acceleration in the commercial performance of the stores”the other half coming from the“cost optimization”. “The associated integration costs, mainly distributed between 2024 and 2025”are estimated at 250 million euros, compared to 200 previously.