After making its exit from Italy, hypermarket group Auchan is now also leaving Vietnam. The French retailer is selling its eighteen outlets as part of a large-scale restructuring effort to compensate for a billion euro loss.
Never found the right model
After admitting to the chain’s difficulties in Italy and Vietnam last March, Auchan’s CEO Edgar Bonte now announced his chain will depart from both markets. Almost all Italian activities will be sold to local group Conad and the stores in Vietnam will be put up for sale too.
Auchan only entered Vietnam in 2015, and was the only Western supermarket chain left in the country after the exit of French rival Casino a year later. However, “we never found the right economic model for the Vietnamese market,” Bonte clarified according to French newspaper Le Monde.
Interested parties
Only last October, the retailer still announced it was going to open 300 new outlets in Vietnam over the next four years. Today, the group barely has eighteen stores in the country, representing a turnover of 45 million euros in 2018. Interested parties have already come forward, a spokesman said to Reuters.
Auchan is in the middle of a serious restructuring effort to make up for its losses. Earlier on, the French group already sold 21 hypermarkets in its domestic market and a strict savings plan has been drafted for the rest of 2019. Last financial year, the retailer ended up with a net loss of 997 million euros.
