Chat with this content: Summary, Analysis, News...
Share on Reddit
Carrefour: The Inventors of the Hypermarket
Introduction & Episode Roadmap
On a muggy summer day in June 1963, Marcel Fournier stood outside a warehouse in the Paris suburb of Sainte-Geneviève-des-Bois, watching hundreds of French families stream through the doors of an experimental new store. What they found inside would reshape global retail: a 2,500-square-meter facility stocked with food, clothing, electronics, and automotive supplies—all under one roof, at discount prices, with 400 free parking spaces outside. By noon, the shelves were bare. The store had to close for restocking. They opened their first hypermarket on 15 June 1963 in Sainte-Geneviève-des-Bois, near Paris.
"Tomorrow, either I'm rich or I'm ruined," Fournier reportedly quipped on opening day. He didn't know it then, but he had just invented the hypermarket—a format that would become Europe's dominant retail model and transform how a billion consumers shop.
Carrefour Group, S.A. is a French multinational retail and wholesaling corporation headquartered in Massy, France. It operates a chain of hypermarkets, grocery stores and convenience stores. By 2024, the group had 14,000 stores in 40 countries. It is the seventh-largest retailer in the world by revenue.
Today, Carrefour sits at a crossroads—fitting for a company whose name means exactly that. In 2024, the company posted net sales of €85.4 billion against €83.3 billion the prior year, making it Europe's largest food retailer. But the company that once rivaled LVMH in market value now trades at a fraction of the luxury conglomerate's worth. Carrefour SA pioneered hypermarkets in France and sold the brand around the world in an ambitious expansion that started more than five decades ago, reaching a market value that was once higher than that of luxury-goods empire LVMH. Since then, Carrefour's fortunes have waned as the chain struggles to compete in its cut-throat home market and it retreats from overseas. Its business is worth a fraction of LVMH's, and Chairman and Chief Executive Officer Alexandre Bompard is struggling to convince investors that he can propel it through a transformation.
The central question haunting investors: How did a small supermarket in the French Alps invent an entirely new retail format that revolutionized global shopping—and then struggle to stay relevant in the digital age?
Carrefour has a market cap of €9.32 billion as of November 2025. Its market cap has decreased by -4.79% in one year. For context, Walmart—the company whose shadow has loomed over Carrefour since the 1999 mega-merger—generated global net sales of nearly $643 billion in 2024. The gap between Europe's retail champion and America's tells a story of strategic choices, missed digital transitions, and the brutal economics of grocery.
This article explores Carrefour's remarkable journey: from the American seminars that inspired its founders, through the hypermarket revolution that remade French consumption, to the Promodès mega-merger that briefly made it a global colossus, and finally to the troubled present as CEO Alexandre Bompard attempts one of retail's most ambitious turnarounds.
Origins & The Founding Vision (1959-1963)
The Meeting That Changed Retail
The French Alps in the late 1950s seem an unlikely birthplace for a retail revolution. Annecy, nestled between crystalline lakes and snow-capped peaks, was better known for medieval charm than commercial ambition. But the city had transformed since World War II, its population swelling with workers drawn to new factories. Here, two men from successful entrepreneurial families would conceive an idea that would reshape global commerce.
Carrefour emerged in 1959 as a collaboration between two entrepreneurs, Marcel Fournier and Louis Defforey, in Annecy, a city in eastern France that had become increasingly industrialized since World War II. Both men came from successful, enterprising families, and each was anxious to expand his own business by building large supermarkets. Fournier already had established the department store Grand Magasin de Nouveautés Fournier d'Annecy and had connections in the Casino supermarket company, and Defforey was president of Badin-Defforey in Lagnieu.
Marcel Fournier was a textile retailer—a man who understood the art of merchandising and the psychology of shoppers. Louis Defforey came from the food wholesale trade, with deep knowledge of supply chains and inventory management. Their complementary expertise would prove essential. In 1959, two entrepreneurs from Annecy in Eastern France - Marcel Fournier, a textile retailer, and Louis Defforey, a wine and food wholesaler - decided to establish a large discount supermarket.
The French Retail Context
To understand Carrefour's innovation, one must grasp just how antiquated French grocery was in the 1950s. In the 1950s the French grocery industry consisted primarily of family operations. Traditional grocery stores, committed to providing a variety of high-quality products, accounted for 83 percent of food sales. As fewer young people entered into family businesses, however, and grocers' unions, independent wholesalers, and food cooperatives increased in number, a need for alternatives to the smaller markets developed.
Picture the shopping experience: small shops where customers waited for clerks to retrieve each item from behind counters, prices that varied based on negotiation, limited selection, and operating hours that assumed housewives had nothing but time. France remained loyal to tradition—the neighborhood boulangerie, the local fromagerie—even as America had already embraced self-service supermarkets.
The concept of "free service" was gaining traction, but execution lagged badly. At that time, the concept of free service was gaining popularity but very few stores in France were equipped to allow shoppers to help themselves by providing them with trolleys, displaying the items conveniently, giving them access to the items, etc. This gap between consumer readiness and retail reality represented enormous opportunity.
The American Influence: Bernardo Trujillo
The spark that ignited Carrefour's ambition came from an unlikely source: a Colombian-born marketing executive working for an American cash register company.
Bernardo Trujillo (1920–1971) was a Colombian-born American marketing executive. He hosted merchandizing seminars as part of cash register company NCR Corporation's marketing strategy, ultimately influencing the development of modern supermarkets, especially in France, where he became known as the "Pope of Supermarketing." Born in 1920 in Colombia, he studied law in Bogotá. He emigrated to the United States and eventually became a naturalized US citizen. Trujillo began his career as a Spanish teacher. In 1944, he was hired as a translator by the NCR Corporation in Dayton, Ohio. From 1957 to 1965, as part of NCR's marketing strategy, Trujillo taught executive education merchandizing seminars to about 11,000 students, the MMM seminars on Modern Merchandizing Methods. In his seminars, he emphasized the need to build supermarket with large parking lots and cheap products and defined many key principles of the industry, such as "No Parking, No Business".
Trujillo's Dayton, Ohio seminars drew retailers from across Europe—Founders of now global retailers such as Carrefour, Fnac, Auchan, or Darty went to these seminars prior to launching their businesses. His teachings were revolutionary for Europeans still wedded to small-format retail: build large facilities on city outskirts where land is cheap, provide massive free parking, stack products high and sell them low, minimize frills, and maximize turnover.
The group was created in 1958 by Marcel Fournier, Denis Defforey and Jacques Defforey, who were influenced by several seminars in the United States led by Bernardo Trujillo. The Defforey brothers traveled to America specifically to observe these concepts in action. What they witnessed fundamentally altered their plans for the Annecy store.
Before construction began at the new site, Louis Defforey and his brother Jacques went to the United States to observe the American commercial structure. Seminars given by Bernardo Trujillo on such modern sales practices as free service, discount prices, and large facilities convinced the Defforeys to completely modify Carrefour's initial plans for the store outside Paris. Although Carrefour did not adopt the huge dimensions of American stores with many cashiers and large aisles, they did construct a relatively large facility and integrated the idea of low prices on every product by purchasing merchandise from wholesalers and producers.
The founders absorbed another Trujillo maxim: "Pile high and sell low." They returned to France determined to bring American retail efficiency to European shoppers—but with adaptations for local tastes and smaller land parcels.
The First Store & the Name
Competition forced their hand. During this time, a businessman named Edouard Leclerc, who was establishing supermarkets in the Rhine-Alps region, announced plans to open a store in Annecy. Fournier and Defforey knew that, to be able to compete, they had to open their store before Leclerc opened his.
The rivalry with Leclerc—which persists to this day, with E.Leclerc now France's market leader—began at the very moment of Carrefour's conception. This urgency shaped the company's culture: move fast, price aggressively, adapt relentlessly.
In May 1959, Fournier and Defforey decided to incorporate these virtually unexploited concepts for their store in Annecy. An offering of 7,000 shares of stock was made to ten stockholders, and a facility already under construction in Annecy was purchased. The ground floor of the building was to be used as the supermarket, while the upper floors, containing apartments, were to be sold to help finance the business. Marcel Fournier was elected president, and Denis Defforey, Louis's son, was chosen as general director.
The name came from geography as much as philosophy. The venture was named Carrefour (Crossroads), as the store was located at the convergence of five roads at Annecy. But "carrefour" also means marketplace in French—Fournier named the business Carrefour, the French transliteration of the Greek word agora, or marketplace. The dual meaning captured both the physical location and the founders' ambition to create a modern agora where all commerce converged.
Before the store opening in Annecy in 1960, a campaign was launched to familiarize customers with the concept of supermarkets. This was highly successful and in the first two days Carrefour attracted more than 15,000 customers. To accommodate the vehicles of the customers, Carrefour expanded the parking lot. But that was not enough to satisfy the growing customer traffic to the store. Traffic jams were reported within the vicinity of the store.
The store was an immediate sensation—and an immediate headache. Success brought chaos: overflowing parking lots, traffic jams, empty shelves. The founders learned their first lesson about scale: the problems of success are better than the problems of failure, but they're still problems.
The Hypermarket Revolution (1963-1975)
Birth of the Hypermarket
Three years after Annecy proved the concept, Carrefour was ready to think bigger. Much bigger.
Inspired by the United States, Carrefour's founder opened the first hypermarket in France in Sainte-Geneviève-des-Bois (91) on 15 June 1963. The hypermarket was the first of its kind in France and offered a vast range of products at low prices over a 2,500m² self-service sales area with 400 free parking spaces.
To grasp what 2,500 square meters meant in 1963 France, consider that traditional grocery stores averaged perhaps 40-100 square meters. Carrefour's hypermarket was 25 to 60 times larger. It wasn't just a bigger store—it was an entirely new concept.
The Carrefour group was the first in Europe to open a hypermarket: a large supermarket and a department store under the same roof. The brilliance lay in combination: why should consumers visit multiple stores when one could satisfy all their needs? Food, clothing, electronics, automotive supplies, household goods—everything under one roof, with parking that didn't require circling for twenty minutes.
The first European hypermarket was opened in France by Carrefour in Sainte-Geneviève-des-Bois in 1963. The hypermarket model was a French innovation, combining food and non-food items under one large roof, and remained a national specialty for a long time.
The gamble was enormous. Fournier's "tomorrow I'm either rich or ruined" comment wasn't hyperbole—the capital requirements for such a massive facility, the inventory needed to fill it, the staff to operate it, all represented bet-the-company risk for a young enterprise.
The Innovation Stack
What made Carrefour's hypermarket revolutionary wasn't any single innovation but the combination of multiple advances working together:
Location strategy: Building on cheap suburban land rather than expensive city centers, following Trujillo's teaching that real estate costs must be minimized to enable low prices.
Scale purchasing: The massive floor space required massive inventory, which justified buying direct from manufacturers in enormous quantities, eliminating middlemen and their markups.
Self-service: Customers served themselves, reducing labor costs and increasing throughput.
Free parking: In an era when French families were just beginning to own automobiles, free parking was transformative—it enabled bulk purchasing impossible for pedestrians or public transit users.
One-stop shopping: By combining grocery and general merchandise, Carrefour captured multiple shopping trips in single visits, increasing average transaction size.
The company's founders created the concept of the hypermarket, an expanded supermarket offering a wide variety of merchandise—including groceries, electronics, clothing, and automotive supplies—that allowed consumers to accomplish most of their shopping at one store. Hypermarkets became a rapid success, revolutionizing the retail industry in France and worldwide.
The hypermarket appealed to younger families moving to new suburbs, budget-conscious consumers battling 1960s inflation, and a France modernizing rapidly after wartime austerity. Shopping became an activity rather than a chore—families made Saturday outings to the hypermarket, browsing, comparing, discovering.
Early Resistance & Cultural Friction
Not everyone celebrated. France's small shopkeepers—the backbone of traditional commerce—viewed hypermarkets as existential threats. They weren't wrong.
The conflict was cultural as much as economic. French identity was tied to artisanal shops: the baker who knew your family, the butcher who selected your cuts, the greengrocer who explained seasonality. Hypermarkets offered efficiency at the cost of intimacy.
Independent butchers' unions blocked Carrefour trucks at slaughterhouses to protest discounting. Legislation emerged to restrict hypermarket expansion. The political battle between "petit commerce" (small shops) and "grande distribution" (large-scale retail) would shape French commercial law for decades, eventually producing the Royer Law of 1973 and Raffarin Law of 1996, both designed to protect small merchants by restricting large-format store openings.
But consumer behavior spoke louder than protests. The French public voted with their shopping carts, and hypermarkets won.
Rapid Expansion & Going Public
Success demanded replication. In January 1965, to avoid government restrictions on expansion, Carrefour formed two divisions: Carrefour Supermarché was led by Marcel Fournier and Denis Defforey, and Grands Magasins Carrefour, a subsidiary, was led by Jacques Defforey and Bernard Fournier. A hypermarket of 10,000 square meters was opened near Lyon in 1966 as well as another of 20,000 square meters in Vitrolles.
The growth was staggering. The Vitrolles store—20,000 square meters—was eight times larger than the original Sainte-Geneviève hypermarket. Each new store refined the model: better layouts, more efficient logistics, enhanced merchandise assortments.
The company went public in 1970. The IPO provided capital for accelerated expansion and legitimized the hypermarket model in the eyes of French business establishment. Carrefour was no longer an experiment—it was an institution.
By the early 1970s, Carrefour had established itself as France's leading hypermarket operator. The founders' vision had been validated. But their ambition extended far beyond French borders. The next chapter would test whether a peculiarly French innovation could travel.
International Expansion & Global Ambitions (1969-1999)
First Steps Abroad
The hypermarket worked brilliantly in France. But France was small. The founders understood that true scale required international expansion—and that being first in new markets would provide competitive moats similar to what they'd built at home.
In 1969, they opened their first international store in Belgium, marking the company's entry into the global market.
Belgium was a logical first step: French-speaking, geographically adjacent, culturally similar. Success there proved the concept could translate beyond France's borders. Carrefour also actively sought involvement with other companies in Europe, including Delhaize Fréres-Le-Lion in Belgium, Mercure in Switzerland, Wheatsheaf Investment in Great Britain, and Italware in Italy, and made major efforts to expand into Mediterranean regions in Europe.
By 1973, Carrefour had planted flags across Europe: Belgium, Switzerland, Italy, Great Britain, and Spain. Each market taught lessons about adaptation—what worked in France didn't automatically work elsewhere. During its international expansion, Carrefour was careful to appeal to new clientele by marketing local products, rather than exporting French products.
This localization philosophy—adapting to local tastes rather than imposing French preferences—would become a Carrefour signature and differentiate it from American retailers who often struggled abroad.
Latin American Beachhead
The boldest international move came in 1975, when Carrefour planted its flag in Brazil—a market that would eventually become crucial to the company's survival.
Brazil offered what France increasingly couldn't: a massive, fast-growing market with limited competition and few restrictions on store expansion. The hypermarket model landed in fertile soil.
From the 1960s, the group grows rapidly in Europe and internationally in Belgium in 1969, Spain in 1973, Brazil in 1975, and the United States (Red Food) in 1979.
South America became a second home for Carrefour. Argentina followed Brazil. The company discovered that emerging middle classes in developing economies, eager to improve their consumption, embraced hypermarkets enthusiastically. The format that had modernized French retail could modernize retail everywhere.
The American Experiment
The United States represented both the ultimate validation and the greatest challenge. After all, American concepts had inspired Carrefour—could the student become the teacher?
In 1988, Carrefour attempted to crack the American market, opening a hypermarket outside Philadelphia. The logic seemed sound: Americans had department stores and Americans had supermarkets, but nobody had combined them with Carrefour's specific formula.
The reality proved harsh. American consumers, already well-served by Walmart, Target, and established grocers, didn't need another option. Distribution costs were higher than expected. Real estate was expensive in desirable markets. The experiment limped along, never achieving critical mass, before Carrefour eventually withdrew.
The American failure taught a painful lesson: not every market can be conquered, and being second or third in a mature market offers little upside against enormous investment requirements.
Founding Family Exit
Fournier dies; by now the company has expanded to ten countries. Marcel Fournier's death in 1985 marked the end of the founding era. He had lived to see his gamble vindicated spectacularly: from a single store in provincial France to a global retailer operating across three continents.
The founding families gradually stepped back from active management through the early 1990s, forming an advisory council while professional managers took operational control. This transition—common in family businesses reaching maturity—would reshape Carrefour's culture and decision-making.
Rise of Private Labels
As Carrefour scaled, it pioneered another innovation that would become standard across retail: private-label products.
In 1976, Carrefour launched "Produits Libres" (free products)—unbranded white packages at substantially lower prices than national brands. The concept was revolutionary: use Carrefour's purchasing power and distribution efficiency to offer quality products without the brand premium.
Private labels served multiple purposes: they increased margins, strengthened customer loyalty (you could only buy these products at Carrefour), and gave negotiating leverage against national brands. Today, Carrefour-branded products represent 37.4% of food sales in H1 2025, up +0.4 point compared to last year.
By the late 1990s, Carrefour had transformed from provincial startup to global retail power. But a looming threat was about to force another transformation: Walmart was coming to Europe.
The Promodès Mega-Merger & Peak Power (1999-2007)
The Deal That Created a Giant
On August 26, 1999, Paul-Louis Halley gathered his top executives at Promodès headquarters in Levallois-Perret for an unscheduled meeting. What he announced left them speechless.
"Lorsque, ce jeudi 26 août, en milieu de matinée, Paul-Louis Halley réunit ses principaux collaborateurs, aucun d'entre eux n'imagine la nouvelle qu'il va annoncer. (...) Cette fameuse nouvelle va changer le visage du commerce dans le monde et bien sûr bousculer les agendas et la vie personnelle de chacun. Au 5e étage du siège, à Levallois-Perret, au nord-ouest de Paris, il est 10 heures quand Paul – comme l'appellent ses proches collaborateurs – entre dans la salle de réunion, un peu tendu. L'ambiance est particulière. Il n'est pas dans son habitude de convoquer son état-major à une réunion au dernier moment, sans ordre du jour. Cette situation inconnue crée un curieux climat où se mêlent interrogations et léger stress. Il s'assied et dit : 'Bonjour, je vous ai réunis ce matin pour vous annoncer que Promodès et Carrefour vont fusionner.' Cette phrase est suivie d'un silence puis il enchaîne, non sans quelque fierté : 'Le nouveau groupe résultant de cette fusion sera le deuxième mondial et le premier en Europe, le premier en France, le premier en Espagne, le premier au Brésil, le premier en Argentine, le premier en Grèce, le premier à Taïwan, en Chine, en Indonésie !' Enfin, il ajoute : 'C'est un mouvement stratégique exceptionnel, le meilleur que nous pouvions imaginer.'"
On 30 August 1999, Carrefour launched a public exchange offer for shares in Promodès, established in 1961. The merger of Carrefour and Promodès results in the second largest retailer in the world with 240,000 employees and 9,000 stores.
The merger was driven by fear—specifically, fear of Walmart. Carrefour en 1999 est en difficulté son actionnariat s'étiole, les fournisseurs se concentrent, le Britannique Ahold et l'Américain Wal-Mart se font de plus en plus pressant et commencent à racheter de large part dans la distribution européenne menaçant même de racheter Carrefour. De plus, les possibilités de croissance organique se réduisent à cause des lois Galland et Raffarin de 1996 qui restreignent l'ouverture de nouvelles grandes surfaces. Enfin Carrefour, encore très marqué par le poids des hypermarchés, doit saturer sa position à travers sa présence dans d'autres formats.
Walmart had just acquired Asda in the UK, signaling aggressive European expansion plans. French law restricted new store openings, limiting organic growth. And Carrefour, despite pioneering hypermarkets, lacked presence in supermarkets, convenience stores, and discount formats where Promodès excelled.
Fear of Wal-Mart prompts huge French merger. Announces the decision of French retailers Carrefour and Promodes to merge to create a global company with 8,888 hypermarkets and supermarkets in 26 countries. Concern over the competition from Wal-Mart of United States as major reason behind the merger; Cost savings expected to result from the...
Carrefour est numéro un de la distribution en France il possède 1640 points de vente, emploie 132 875 personnes et génère un Chiffre d'affaire de 23 Milliards d'euro ; Promodès quand a lui est numéro 6 il dispose de 5978 points de vente (franchises compris) emploie 73905 personnes et génère un Chiffre d'Affaire de 15 milliards d'euros. Leur fusion propulse Carrefour au deuxième rang mondial de la grande distribution.
Carrefour and Promodes have merged to form Europe's largest retailer. The Ffr111 billion ($17.7 billion) deal will produce a combined chain of 9000 stores, and anticipated net sales of Ffr355 billion ($56.5 billion) this year.
Integration Challenges
The merger created a behemoth—but combining two proud corporate cultures proved far more difficult than combining balance sheets.
Bien que culturellement opposé, Carrefour est un groupe intégré et très centralisé alors que Promodès est essentiellement un réseau franchisé et diversifié, Carrefour et Promodès sont complémentaires à l'international.
Carrefour was centralized and integrated; Promodès was decentralized and franchise-heavy. Carrefour focused on hypermarkets; Promodès operated Champion supermarkets, Shopi convenience stores, and Dia discount outlets. The complementarity that made the merger strategically sensible also created integration headaches.
Post-merger, Carrefour found itself managing multiple formats (Champion, Dia, Promodès supermarkets) with different systems, different cultures, and different customer propositions. The promised synergies took years to materialize fully. Stock market impatience grew.
E-commerce Dawn
The millennium brought not just a new name for the combined company but an entirely new competitive front: the internet.
As e-commerce was just starting to take off, Carrefour launched its on-line supermarket Ooshop in 2000 with 6,000 products including a thousand fresh products.
Ooshop represented Carrefour's first foray into digital retail—an acknowledgment that shopping habits were changing. But the effort remained a sideshow to the core hypermarket business. The company that had revolutionized physical retail would prove far less adept at digital transformation.
China Entry
Asia represented the next frontier. Carrefour entered China in 1995 through a joint venture and opened the first largest hypermarket in Beijing – Beijing Chuangyi Store. Taking the first-comer advantages, Carrefour had remained as the fastest-growing foreign retailers in China during its operation for about two decades.
Carrefour entered China in 1995, introducing self-service shopping and centralised checkout at a time when most retail operated behind counters and glass displays. The format revolutionised the Chinese shopping experience and helped Carrefour expand rapidly.
For a decade, China looked like Carrefour's greatest international success. The hypermarket format resonated with newly prosperous Chinese consumers eager for modern shopping experiences. The retailer also introduced China to the slotting fee model, requiring suppliers to pay for shelf space, product placement, and in-store promotions. The model, which became widespread across China's retail industry, was especially influential.
By the mid-2000s, Carrefour had achieved peak power. It was Europe's undisputed retail champion, present on five continents, with the scale to compete against Walmart globally. The hypermarket revolution had triumphed.
But the seeds of future troubles were already planted. E-commerce was rising. Hard discounters like Aldi and Lidl were stealing value-conscious customers. And the hypermarket format itself—the very foundation of Carrefour's success—was showing signs of strain.
The Troubled Decade: Lost in Transition (2008-2017)
Hypermarket Format Under Siege
The financial crisis of 2008 marked more than an economic downturn—it signaled a fundamental shift in consumer behavior that would threaten Carrefour's core business model.
Hypermarkets had thrived when consumers made weekly shopping trips, filling large cars with bulk purchases. But urban patterns were changing. Families were smaller. Women worked outside the home. Time became the scarce resource, not money. Convenience stores near homes and offices gained appeal. The big weekly shop was becoming an occasional inconvenience rather than a Saturday ritual.
Simultaneously, hard discounters like Aldi and Lidl expanded aggressively across France, stealing price-sensitive customers with stripped-down formats and razor-thin margins. Carrefour found itself squeezed from both ends: convenience retailers taking the quick-trip occasions, discounters taking the budget-conscious bulk buyers.
The hypermarket—Carrefour's greatest invention—was becoming its greatest liability.
The Carrefour Planet Disaster
Management's response was Carrefour Planet: a €1.5 billion investment to transform hypermarkets into "experience destinations" with upgraded aesthetics, expanded services, and enhanced ambiance. The concept launched in 2011 with grandiose ambitions.
The results were disastrous. Costs spiraled while revenues declined. The transformation proved "too costly (€369 million in 2011) and didn't stop the continuous decline in revenue." The concept was abandoned in early 2012 after restructuring only 92 hypermarkets out of 245 planned.
Carrefour Planet epitomized the company's strategic confusion: unsure whether to compete on price like discounters or differentiate on experience like premium retailers, it attempted both and achieved neither.
CEO Carousel & Strategic Drift
Between 2008 and 2017, Carrefour cycled through multiple CEOs, each with different visions and priorities. The instability prevented coherent long-term strategy implementation and demoralized employees uncertain about direction.
On e-commerce—increasingly the competitive battleground—Carrefour fell critically behind. On the drive segment (click-and-collect), which was trending in food retail, Carrefour ran very late and struggled to exceed 8-9% market share. This was obviously insufficient. While Auchan initiated drive-through grocery in 2000 and Leclerc followed in 2007, Carrefour waited until late 2010 to launch. The delay at startup was never recovered.
The e-commerce failures were particularly painful because they represented exactly the kind of format disruption that Carrefour had once pioneered. The company that invented the hypermarket couldn't invent its digital successor.
Brand Rationalization
Amid strategic drift, Carrefour did manage one significant simplification: brand rationalization.
The Group undertakes a vast store renovation programme in order to give them all the Carrefour identity. The Champion brand disappeared and was replaced by Carrefour Market.
The Champion supermarket brand—inherited from Promodès—gave way to Carrefour Market. The unification made marketing sense: concentrate brand-building investment behind a single name rather than fragmenting across multiple banners.
But rationalizing brands was simpler than rationalizing strategy. The fundamental question—what was Carrefour's competitive advantage in a world of e-commerce and hard discount?—remained unanswered.
International Retreats Begin
International retrenchment accelerated. By then, this used-to-be largest foreign retailer in China has been perceived exiting from China's market, followed by similar actions taken by the UK retailers B&Q and Tesco.
Markets that once seemed promising proved unprofitable. Carrefour exited Russia just months after entering in 2009. Korea, Slovakia, and others followed. Each exit represented not just lost investment but lost opportunity—markets where competitors would now build positions Carrefour abandoned.
The retreats reflected a broader truth: international expansion was harder than Carrefour had assumed. Local knowledge, local relationships, local adaptation—all were essential, and all required sustained commitment that distant headquarters couldn't always provide.
By 2017, Carrefour needed a turnaround. Its core format was declining, its digital capabilities were lacking, its international portfolio was shrinking, and its leadership was unstable. The board turned to an outsider with a track record of retail transformation.
The Bompard Era: Transformation Under Pressure (2017-Present)
A New CEO with a Bold Plan
Alexandre Bompard (born 4 October 1972) is a French businessman. He has been the chairman and CEO of the retail multinational Carrefour since July 2017. He was chairman and CEO of Fnac (books and multimedia retailer) from 2010 to 2017, and of Europe 1 (radio station) from 2008 to 2010. Alexandre Bompard was born on 4 October 1972 in Saint-Étienne, France. He is the son of Alain Bompard, a businessman and president of the AS Saint-Étienne football club from 1997 to 2003. Bompard graduated from Sciences Po Paris in 1994 and was admitted to the École nationale d'administration where he graduated with the 1999 promotion Cyrano de Bergerac.
Bompard was no retailer by training. His background—government administration, media management, electronics retail—was eclectic. But at Fnac, he had proven capable of transforming a struggling retailer facing Amazon's onslaught. The board hoped he could work similar magic at Carrefour.
Pourtant, Alexandre Bompard partait de loin en matière d'innovation : « Nous n'étions ni à la hauteur des géants du numérique, ni à celle de nos principaux concurrents du retail physique. À l'époque, personne chez Carrefour ne pensait que les consommateurs feraient leurs courses en ligne. Il fallait faire évoluer nos convictions. »
Bompard inherited a company deeply skeptical of digital transformation. Changing that mindset would prove as challenging as changing operations.
Carrefour 2022: The Turnaround Blueprint
In January 2018, Bompard unveiled "Carrefour 2022"—a five-year transformation plan built on four pillars:
Simplification: Reducing headquarters complexity, closing the corporate office in Boulogne, and offering voluntary redundancy to 2,400 head office employees in France.
E-commerce investment: Targeting €5 billion in food e-commerce revenue by 2022, aiming for online market share equivalent to physical store market share (above 20%).
Organic and sustainable: Growing organic product revenue from €1.3 billion to €5 billion by 2022.
Cost reduction: €2 billion in cost savings to fund investments.
His first move was to set new standards for better food and package sustainability, limitation of food waste, development of bioproducts, e-commerce partnerships, two billion euros in annual investments from 2018 as well as organisational and cost reduction measures.
The plan acknowledged painful truths: Carrefour had become bloated, digitally backward, and strategically unfocused. Transformation would require sacrifice before growth.
Digital Overhaul
The digital transformation was dramatic. Bompard announced consolidation of eight unconnected e-commerce platforms and fourteen applications into unified national websites. The Ooshop brand—Carrefour's first e-commerce attempt—would disappear, replaced by a single Carrefour.fr offering "simplified, unique access to all commercial offerings."
Partnerships accelerated the digital push. Carrefour joined forces with Google to develop AI-powered voice shopping. Collaborations with Uber enabled delivery from hypermarkets. The company invested heavily in mobile applications, loyalty programs, and data analytics.
E-commerce continued its strong momentum with a +16% increase in GMV in H1 (of which +20% in Q2), notably driven by Brazil (+26% in H1, and +36% in Q2).
The China Collapse
In 2019, he took Carrefour out of China where the group was losing money.
The China exit was Bompard's most decisive international move. Carrefour, which has been in China since 1995, has spent years trying to fix a business where 2018 sales fell 5.9% to 4.1 billion euros amid fierce competition from local players and a buoyant online market. The French retailer said in a statement it had agreed to sell 80% of its Chinese operations to Chinese group Suning.com for 620 million euros in cash.
Suning, which bought an 80% stake in Carrefour China in 2019 for RMB 4.8 billion (US$ 662 million), said it will now pivot back to its core home appliance business.
The story of Carrefour China became one of retail's most dramatic declines. At that time, although Carrefour had reported nearly 30 billion yuan in revenue in 2018, with 210 large hypermarkets and 24 convenience stores in China, its cumulative losses for 2017–2018 had already exceeded 1.6 billion yuan. Carrefour China's operations continued to decline, with cumulative losses exceeding 4.6 billion yuan from 2022 to 2024.
With just three stores left in the country, Carrefour's retreat marks more than the exit of a foreign brand. It signals the end of an era in Chinese retail—one that once shaped how everything from appliances to wine reached the shelves.
The Chinese failure illustrated a broader lesson: e-commerce disruption in emerging markets moved faster than in developed ones. Alibaba and JD.com transformed Chinese retail while Carrefour still operated as though the hypermarket was king.
Recent Acquisitions & Strategy
Under Bompard, Carrefour shifted from expanding internationally to consolidating domestically. In 2024, he led Carrefour's acquisition of Cora and Match (175 chain stores).
In 2024, the retailer also completed the acquisition of Cora and Match banners in France. The €1.05 billion deal added significant hypermarket and supermarket presence in northeastern France, strengthening Carrefour's home market position.
Carrefour expanded its franchise network with 454 new convenience stores and completed acquisitions of Cora and Match banners.
Casino's troubles created additional opportunity. To date, 27 stores have been acquired, including 24 from Casino and three directly from Intermarché, for a provisional purchase price of 41 million euros.
The shift toward franchising accelerated. Transferring stores to franchise or lease management reduced capital intensity while maintaining network presence. In France, transfers of stores to lease management are progressing as planned since the announcement in February: 11 hypermarkets and 12 supermarkets have already been transferred.
Brazil: The Bright Spot
While Europe struggled and Asia collapsed, Brazil emerged as Carrefour's salvation.
Carrefour Brasil now represents about 20% of the global group's sales, making Brazil its second-largest market behind France. Management plans to accelerate AtacadĂŁo expansion from 2026, aiming to add roughly 100 outlets by 2027.
The Atacadão cash-and-carry format—warehouses selling to small businesses and bulk-buying consumers—proved perfectly suited to Brazilian retail dynamics. Atacadão accounted for roughly 72% of total sales.
Shareholders approved a proposal to delist Carrefour Brasil from B3, with 59% voting in favor at the extraordinary general meeting on April 25. The French parent plans to complete the privatization by mid-June, streamlining governance and accelerating decisions. According to data compiled by LSEG, Carrefour Brasil reported net income of R$225 million in the first quarter of 2025, up sharply from R$39 million a year earlier. The company reported adjusted net income of R$282 million, compared with R$52 million in Q1 2024. Total revenue climbed 6.2% year-on-year to R$27.99 billion.
The 2025 privatization of Carrefour Brazil—taking it from the B3 exchange—represented Bompard's most significant capital allocation decision. "Delisting the company will allow it to manage operations with more agility and enhanced focus on execution," Carrefour said in a statement.
The Italy Exit
The strategic review launched in 2025 bore fruit—or perhaps more accurately, pruned deadwood.
Carrefour supermarkets in Italy will soon be in the hands of Italian food multinational NewPrinces Spa, who announced the roughly one billion euro purchase. The NewPrinces group owns the Plasmon, Centrale del Latte, Giglio, Polenghi Lombardo and Delverde food manufacturing brands. The acquisition of approximately one thousand shops now requires authorisation from the relevant authorities, with a view to closing by the end of the year.
In 2024, the Italian division saw a 5.3 percent decrease in sales to EUR 3.6 billion and a loss of EUR 250 million.
The French newspaper Les Echos commented on the news, writing that Carrefour 'removes a thorn from its foot', as its Italian operations were recording annual losses of €180 million.
The Italy sale continued a pattern: exit markets where Carrefour lacks competitive advantage, concentrate on markets where it can win.
Current Performance & Outlook
French retailer Carrefour has posted solid results for its financial year 2024, driven by profitability in core countries. Carrefour reported full-year sales growth of 9.9% on a like-for-like basis to €94.6 billion, while adjusted EBITDA grew by 1.7% to €4.6 billion. Alexandre Bompard, chair and CEO, stated, "The group today presents solid financial results and indicators confirming the strong progress of its strategic plan." "The shift towards franchising continues, private label and e-commerce sales are growing, and the group has achieved 111% of its CSR index target."
In 2024, Carrefour made substantial investments to enhance its competitiveness, with a tangible impact on customer satisfaction (+5pts in NPS®), and on market share dynamics, particularly in France, Spain, and Brazil. These efforts were notably financed by the successful execution of the Group's cost savings plan, which delivered €1,240m in savings over the year. The Group's financial results reflect these dynamics, with EBITDA and Recurring Operating Income (ROI) slightly growing at constant exchange rates compared to 2023. Net free cash flow stood at €1,457m, in line with the multi-year target.
The 2025 performance shows acceleration. French retailer Carrefour has reported a 4.4% increase in like-for-like (LFL) sales for the second quarter (Q2) of 2025 - an improvement from the 2.9% growth seen in Q1. The retailer saw a 4.9% rise in food sales and a 1.4% increase in non-food sales on a LFL basis during this period. The company experienced a turnaround in France, with sales growing by 2.1% on a LFL basis, compared to a decline of 1.7% in the previous quarter. Spain also showed strong performance with a 2.9% LFL sales increase.
On July 24, 2025, Carrefour's Board of Directors proposed the renewal of Alexandre Bompard's term as Chairman and CEO at the upcoming Annual General Meeting on May 22, 2026. This proposal received unanimous support from the Board's Governance Committee, highlighting confidence in Bompard's leadership. Since July 2017, Bompard has led a substantial transformation at Carrefour, enhancing its competitiveness and financial strength.
Competitive Position & Analysis
The French Market: E.Leclerc's Lead
E.Leclerc holds the largest market share with 23.9 percent, followed by Carrefour with a 19.6 percent share.
The Carrefour Group, which includes Cora and Match banners, gained 2.1 points to hold 21.8% of the market. E.Leclerc has once again emerged as France's top retailer with a market share of 24.6%, according to the latest data from Kantar.
While the gap in market share between E.Leclerc and Carrefour was around 2.4 percentage points in January 2021, E.Leclerc managed to widen the gap with its biggest rival on the home front to 4.3 percentage points by October 2023.
The market share gap reflects structural differences. E.Leclerc operates as an independent cooperative—owner-operators who are deeply invested in local markets. Carrefour operates as an integrated group—centralized control but potentially less entrepreneurial energy at store level.
E.Leclerc also moved faster on click-and-collect (drive-through grocery). In 2024, E.Leclerc Drive was the leading drive-thru grocery retailer in France, with approximately 5.5 billion euros in revenues. Its main competitors, including Carrefour Drive and Le Drive Intermarché, trailed behind with around 1.6 billion euros and 1.5 billion in revenues, respectively. That year, E.Leclerc Drive controlled nearly half of the drive-thru grocery market in France.
Global Competition: Walmart's Shadow
Amazon continues as the second largest retailer globally, followed by Schwarz Group, Aldi, Costco Wholesale, Ahold Delhaize, Carrefour, Seven & I, IKEA and The Home Depot.
Carrefour ranks seventh globally—respectable, but far behind Walmart's dominant position. In 2024, the company generated global net sales of nearly 643 billion U.S. dollars. Walmart's revenues are roughly seven times Carrefour's.
The competitive dynamics have shifted since the 1999 merger. Hard discounters (Schwarz Group, which owns Lidl; Aldi) have grown faster than traditional hypermarket operators. Amazon has captured a growing share of non-food retail. Grocery delivery services have emerged as significant competition.
Porter's Five Forces Analysis
Supplier Power: Moderate. Large retailers like Carrefour wield significant bargaining power through volume purchasing. However, suppliers have gained leverage through consolidation (fewer, larger CPG companies) and through e-commerce channels that bypass traditional retail.
Buyer Power: High. Consumers face low switching costs—changing supermarkets requires no contract cancellation, no account migration. Price transparency through apps and websites intensifies competition. Customer loyalty remains possible through loyalty programs and private labels, but requires constant investment.
Threat of New Entrants: Moderate to High. Traditional physical retail has high barriers (capital requirements, real estate, supply chain), but e-commerce has dramatically lowered entry barriers. Amazon can enter grocery with existing logistics infrastructure. Dark store operators (delivery-only facilities) can launch with modest investment.
Threat of Substitutes: High. Food delivery services (Uber Eats, Deliveroo), meal kit subscriptions, direct-to-consumer brands, and instant delivery operators all substitute for traditional grocery shopping occasions.
Competitive Rivalry: Intense. French grocery is a mature market with multiple well-capitalized players (E.Leclerc, Carrefour, Les Mousquetaires, Auchan, Lidl, Aldi) competing intensely on price. Margins are thin; market share gains come largely at competitors' expense.
Hamilton Helmer's 7 Powers Analysis
Carrefour's competitive position can be analyzed through Hamilton Helmer's framework:
Scale Economies: Carrefour benefits from purchasing scale, but so do competitors. No decisive scale advantage exists.
Network Effects: Limited. Retail lacks direct network effects—more Carrefour customers don't make the experience better for other customers (unlike platforms where more users create more value).
Counter-Positioning: Carrefour's traditional hypermarket model has been counter-positioned against by hard discounters (simpler format, lower costs) and e-commerce (no physical store costs). Carrefour itself hasn't successfully counter-positioned against anyone.
Switching Costs: Low. Customers can switch grocers costlessly.
Branding: Moderate. Carrefour has strong brand recognition in France and Brazil, but grocery branding is less defensible than luxury or technology branding.
Cornered Resource: None apparent. Carrefour doesn't control unique suppliers, talent, or IP.
Process Power: Limited. Carrefour's operational processes aren't demonstrably superior to competitors.
The framework reveals Carrefour's strategic challenge: it possesses no strong "power" in Helmer's sense. The business competes on execution and capital rather than structural advantages.
Bull and Bear Cases
The Bull Case
French market consolidation: Casino's collapse is reshaping French grocery. Carrefour's acquisitions of Cora, Match, and Casino stores position it to benefit. Cette acquisition, la plus importante pour Carrefour après le rachat du groupe Promodès en 1999, a un seul objectif, conforter sa deuxième place derrière Leclerc et rester devant Intermarché.
Brazil growth engine: Carrefour Brasil, now fully controlled, offers strong growth potential in a market where modern retail remains underpenetrated. Management plans to accelerate AtacadĂŁo expansion from 2026, aiming to add roughly 100 outlets by 2027.
Transformation progress: Bompard's strategic plan has delivered tangible results: €1.24 billion in cost savings in 2024, growing private label penetration, improved e-commerce momentum, and narrowing price gaps against E.Leclerc.
Valuation: The stock trades at modest multiples, pricing in significant pessimism. Any operational improvement could drive meaningful rerating.
Strategic optionality: The portfolio cleanup (exiting Italy, privatizing Brazil) simplifies the investment story and focuses resources on markets where Carrefour can win.
The Bear Case
Structural decline of hypermarkets: The format Carrefour invented continues losing share to convenience stores, hard discounters, and e-commerce. Hypermarkets lost 0.3 points of market share to 38.4%, and supermarkets were down 0.4 points to 31.0% - both reflecting a decline in average purchase quantities.
E.Leclerc's dominance: The market leader continues widening its gap, particularly in drive-through grocery where it controls nearly half the French market.
Hard discounter pressure: Lidl and Aldi continue gaining share in France and Europe, offering lower prices that Carrefour struggles to match profitably.
E-commerce catch-up: Despite improvement, Carrefour started late and competes against Amazon, Ocado, and well-funded delivery startups.
Brazilian risks: Currency volatility, political instability, and intense competition (from domestic players and Walmart through Sam's Club franchise) create execution risk in Carrefour's key growth market.
Labor and social pressures: En 6 ans, le bilan social de ce projet de transformation de Bompard s'est d'abord traduit par une baisse massive des effectifs. En effet, il y avait 109 000 salariés en France lors de l'arrivée d'Alexandre Bompard, et aujourd'hui nous sommes moins de 74 000 salariés, plus de 33,8 % de l'effectif en moins. Workforce reductions have enabled cost savings but create social and political risks.
Myth vs. Reality
Myth: "Carrefour invented hypermarkets and therefore understands retail better than competitors."
Reality: Innovation capability is not inherited. The founders who created hypermarkets are long gone. Current management inherited stores and systems, not entrepreneurial genius. E.Leclerc's cooperative model may actually foster more bottom-up innovation than Carrefour's corporate structure.
Myth: "International diversification protects against French market weakness."
Reality: After decades of international expansion and retreat, Carrefour derives the vast majority of profits from just three markets: France, Brazil, and Spain. International diversification has cost more than it's contributed.
Myth: "Carrefour can compete on price with hard discounters."
Reality: Carrefour's cost structure—including large-format stores, extensive product ranges, and higher labor costs—makes structural price parity with Lidl or Aldi impossible. Carrefour must compete on selection, convenience, and experience rather than pure price.
Key Metrics for Investors
For investors tracking Carrefour's ongoing performance, three KPIs deserve particular attention:
1. Like-for-Like Sales Growth (Same-Store Sales) This metric strips out new store openings and closures to reveal organic growth of existing operations. For Carrefour France specifically, LFL sales growth indicates whether the transformation is resonating with customers. The Q2 2025 figure of +2.1% (vs -1.7% in Q1) suggests momentum improvement, but sustained positive LFL growth is essential to demonstrate competitive positioning.
2. Private Label Penetration At 37.4% of food sales in H1 2025, Carrefour-branded products represent both margin protection and customer loyalty. Higher private label penetration indicates customers are choosing Carrefour for distinctive products rather than just convenience. This metric also reveals pricing power—customers accept Carrefour's quality/price proposition.
3. Operating Margin by Segment Given the different profit profiles of France, Brazil, and other operations, segment-level operating margins reveal where value is being created or destroyed. France's operating margin improvement to 2.6% in 2024 (up 5 basis points) suggests the cost savings are flowing through to profitability. Brazil's margins reflect the AtacadĂŁo cash-and-carry model's efficiency. Declining segment margins would signal transformation stalling.
Conclusion: A Crossroads at the Crossroads
Sixty years after Marcel Fournier's hypermarket gamble, Carrefour once again finds itself at a crossroads—appropriately named.
The company that revolutionized retail faces competition from formats it didn't invent: hard discount, convenience, e-commerce, instant delivery. The markets where it once dominated—France, China, Italy—have become battlegrounds where victory is uncertain or defeat is complete.
Yet Carrefour possesses assets few competitors match: the most extensive store network in European food retail, a dominant position in Brazilian cash-and-carry, valuable real estate, and a brand that 105 million households recognize. Alexandre Bompard's transformation, eight years underway, has stabilized finances, rationalized the portfolio, and narrowed competitive gaps.
The question facing investors isn't whether Carrefour will survive—it almost certainly will—but whether it can thrive. Can a company built around hypermarkets adapt to a world that has moved on from weekly bulk shopping? Can scale advantages be preserved while cost structures shrink? Can a European retailer truly win in Brazil, or will local knowledge prove decisive?
The hypermarket revolution succeeded because it understood what consumers wanted before consumers knew they wanted it. Today's revolution is different: consumers know exactly what they want—convenience, value, experience—and dozens of competitors are racing to provide it.
Carrefour's founders made their fortune by being first. Their successors must now make theirs by being better. In a world of retail abundance, that's a harder trick. But for those with patience and conviction, the company that invented modern retail may yet reinvent itself for its next era.
À la clé, deux nouveaux mantras sont introduits au sein de la direction de Carrefour : « Nous ne pourrons pas rester leaders si nous n'innovons pas. » « Étant donné notre taille, l'innovation ne peut pas être annexe, mais doit être transverse et partagée par l'ensemble des équipes. »
Bompard's mantras acknowledge the challenge. Whether they predict the outcome remains to be seen.
Spotify
Apple Podcasts
Amazon Music
Audible
YouTube
Castbox
Pocket Casts