Interview Alexandre De Palmas, Directeur Général de Carrefour Espagne

So I arrived in July 2020, a little less than a year ago in Spain, in the middle of the pandemic, in the middle of the crisis. I came from Carrefour France where I was in charge of proximity stores, the smallest stores. And before working for Carrefour, I have a very varied experience: I worked in publishing, advertising, catering, real estate, so I did very different things. I arrived in Spain both to finish managing the pandemic, to drive growth which is Carrefour's ambition in Spain, and to try to adapt our commercial offer to the situation of Spain today.

The pandemic, like for many companies, was an incredible shock for Carrefour in Spain. We experienced very different movements. Customers rushed to the stores at the beginning of the lockdown. Conversely, many of our hypermarket stores were closed, at least the non-food sections very quickly. The proximity stores were first stormed, then deserted. So it was a very complicated phenomenon to manage, first for Carrefour employees in the stores who were on the front line. It was very difficult at the beginning; I was afraid for them, which is understandable. And then it was difficult to manage logistically to have the merchandise, to stay open, to face and manage the influx of customers. It was a very complicated period.

There is a very strong trend: the desire to do complete shopping. Ultimately, customers come a little less often, but when they come they spend more and shop for a little longer, as if there was a desire to limit risks by going a little less often but stocking a little more products. I think that for now, maybe this trend will persist.

We proposed to the Spanish government and the communities to make our shopping centers available as vaccination sites because we have both parking space, space to do it safely, we have very important freezers to store vaccines, and we have space to vaccinate. The Community of Madrid was the first to accept this proposal, and we are very happy to be the first private entity in Spain where you can get vaccinated today.

I believe the pandemic changed a lot of things. Among the things that changed is society's view of people who work in distribution. We realized an obvious fact that we had forgotten: we need cashiers, we need people who deliver, truck drivers, we need people who stock the shelves to be able to eat every day. And these jobs, which in the minds of many were devalued, regained importance. For us, that was very good for the teams in the stores. It was really very positive at a time when, once again, they were afraid for themselves and their families and found themselves in a situation of intense stress. So this recognition by the public of their profession was a form of reward.

The Spanish market is a paradox in Europe. There are two very strong specificities. First, it is the European market with the largest leader: Mercadona has 30% of the Spanish market. In no other country do you have a leader of that size. And at the same time, it is the most fragmented market in Europe because you have more than forty distributors of significant size today, due to all the regional chains that no longer exist elsewhere. So it is a very concentrated market at the top and very fragmented in reality. Carrefour is positioned there; we are number 2 in the market with a little over 9% of the Spanish market. We are mainly present in hypermarkets but also in supermarkets and proximity stores. Today our roadmap in Spain is a roadmap of development and expansion. We open about a hundred new stores per year. We made the acquisition of Supersol a few weeks ago. We intend to continue growing in Spain by opening stores and buying stores to consolidate our number 2 position and increase our surface area in Spain.

I believe the supermarket of the future is first a supermarket that meets customer expectations. It is not necessarily an ultra-technological supermarket as one might imagine; it is not a science fiction supermarket. It is a supermarket that corresponds to what the customer wants. What does the customer want? They want local products, healthy products, obviously as cheap as possible with short supply chains. They want organic products, gluten-free, lactose-free depending on their specificities. So it is a store that will no longer have everything for everyone, but will have each product for each customer. It is a precision store and no longer a generalist store. That is the supermarket of the future, much more than something extremely technological.

Today we work a lot on data in general and on artificial intelligence because it allows us to process considerable volumes of data. We use it to better understand what our customers want. We use it to adapt what we call the assortment: the products you find in each store. Today you don't have two Carrefour stores with the same assortment; that's over. Each assortment is worked product by product, reference by reference, depending on the location and the people who live around. If you have young people near a university, elderly people, urban, rural, tourists, the assortment will change. And that is thanks to all the data we collect and use solely for ourselves to modify and improve the assortment. So that is a concrete example of how we use artificial intelligence today to improve the commercial performance of a store.

We are coming out of the health crisis and entering the economic crisis. That is to say, today our situation is that we will gradually, I hope, free ourselves through vaccination from the constraints and health barriers. Today we still have circulation limits, capacity limits, so we are not out of that crisis yet, we are getting there. But we will enter the economic crisis. We can see it: growth in Spain is not very strong, unemployment in Spain is very high. We are heading, unfortunately, towards years where purchasing power will be an extremely strong concern for customers. The price-quality ratio will be extremely important. So we have clearly made this turn. Today we are entering a period where we will engage very strongly for the purchasing power of Spanish families. We are here to help. We helped during the health crisis at times when people wondered what they were going to be able to eat. Today we will help on purchasing power. So our commitment is to be at the best price-quality ratio and to seek low prices, especially to help families with significant consumption needs.