The retail giant Carrefour announced on Monday that it is officially buying the Cora stores from the Belgian group Louis Delhaize, which will switch to the Carrefour brand, as well as the Match stores, which will keep theirs.
The group indicated in a press release 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 distribution market and employ 22,000 people.
This acquisition, “the most important for Carrefour since the acquisition of Promodès” in 1999, according to CEO Alexandre Bompard, allows Carrefour to consolidate its second place behind E.Leclerc, which holds almost a quarter of the market, and ahead of Les Mousquetaires/Intermarché which bought many stores from the struggling Casino group.
Carrefour announced in mid-June that it had obtained an exemption from the Competition Authority to carry out this acquisition without waiting for its decision on the transaction, expected “by the end of the first quarter of 2025” according to Carrefour.
The distributor considers “the competition issues to be limited” due to “the strong geographical complementarity of the two groups” and the “benefit of the operation” for “the consumer”.
During a telephone press briefing on Monday, Alexandre Bompard specified that “from October, each Cora store that changes its brand” will lower prices “by at least 10% on nearly 3,000 products” sold. A figure to be compared with the number of references sold in hypermarkets, between 20 and 35,000.
Cora hypermarkets will be transferred to the Carrefour brand by the end of the year, while the Match brand will be retained.
In a letter to new employees seen by AFP on Monday, Alexandre Bompard explained that Cora must “benefit from a new lease of life” while Match “will retain its uniqueness”.
The project will be presented to the social partners “in the coming days”, he added.
Asked by the press about the possibility of the acquired stores being converted into franchises or lease-management, store operating methods favoured by the distributor but criticised by its unions, Alexandre Bompard replied that the acquired stores “will be developed at this stage in an integrated manner”.
Carrefour said it was revising upwards the “synergy potential” of the operation, now considering an “additional contribution to EBITDA (gross operating surplus) of 130 million euros” per year “by 2027”, compared to 110 million previously.
“These synergies will be generated half by an acceleration of the commercial performance of the stores”, the other half coming from “cost optimization”.
“The associated integration costs, mainly spread between 2024 and 2025”, are estimated at 250 million euros, compared to 200 previously.
