Carrefour is a French international hypermarket chain. Carrefour is the largest hypermarket chain in the world in terms of size the second largest retail group in the world in terms of revenue. However, to my surprise, it only ranked number three inprofit after Wal-mart and Tesco.
To figure out why Carrefour’s revenue was not as large as its size, I focus on Carrefour’s failure in Japan. General merchandise store is an innovation of Carrefour and Carrefour had opened thousands of general merchandise store all over the world. According to the autobiography of Sam Walton, the founder of Wal-mart, the establishment of Wal-mart super center was inspired by Carrefour. Carrefour entered Japan in 2000 and quit in 2005. The deep reason of Carrefour’s failure is Carrefour set its strategy and brand position inappropriately. Most of the Japanese live in small apartments or houses. Dislike Europeans, Japanese consumers like to buy fresh fruit and vegetables everyday because they don’t have much room to store food. However, Carrefour didn’t aware of this consumption custom and didn’t change its strategy. What we can learn from Carrefour’s failure is: accompanies should always fully research the target market and set appropriate strategy.
