The presentations of the annual results happened couple of weeks ago, and you can access to it below.
Here are the main highlights I consider:
About Pricing and promotions: Carrefour is not eager to be the leader in the deflation. Carrefour, after having been in France one of the most promotional retailer, is eager to lower its promotions, as some of the discount rates it proposed in 2015 sometimes could easilly go higher than 50%.
About digitalization: A lot of questions are about the Ecommerce strategy of Carrefour. A lot of questions about Rue du Commerce, bought last year. Carrefour wants to develop the Click & Collect. Actually, I believe Georges Plassat has not convinced much of his audience by his moderation in the efforts in this field.
About the drive, for Georges Plassat, the expansion of this concept is linked to its ability to be profitable, and find the right system of operational costs.
About the Different Emerging Market: Carrefour is doing way better in Brazil, but is still struggling in a difficult market, with a lot of social tension.
Italy has been evoqued several times, it is getting better too. A lot of new store concepts have been developped over there.
China is also a difficult market, and the EBITDA could get even worse. Soon. Nevertheless, Georges Plassat is confident in the future of China in several years.
About The Hypermarket
Georges Plassat remain certain that the hypermarket will remain the main format of Carrefour, and that it needs to be empowered by new services to keep its attractivity.
To be honest, Georges Plassat has thriven on its policy and strategy to focus on operations and the basics. Carrefour has indeed experienced much different strategies (the launch of Carrefour Market, Carrefour Planet, 3 CEOs in a very short period of time).
But Georges plassat seems to struggle to give a new fresh air to Carrefour's strategy to really enter into the omnichannel business, and being able to innovate.
