French retail giant Carrefour has reported a 2.9% rise in third-quarter sales to €20.3bn (US$25.0bn), but warned profits for the full year would fall short of its guidance.
Go deeper with GlobalData
Discover B2B Marketing That Performs
Combine business intelligence and editorial excellence to reach engaged professionals across 36 leading media platforms.
Excluding currency effects, third-quarter sales rose 4.2%. Like-for-like sales edged up 0.6%.
Carrefour said that since its report at the beginning of September, the market in France – as well as in most other European countries – has deteriorated sharply.
“The trend in consumption in France turned down in September for everyone in the food retailing industry, including even the hard discounters. Volumes are down significantly, and we see industry-wide deflation in food as well as non-food,” the company said.
Over the quarter, the company said it had been investing to strengthen its pricing position in all its countries and formats. In its French hypermarkets, Carrefour invested €229m in price over the first nine months to make its stores more competitive on price. The company said it will invest whatever is necessary to achieve its goal of being the price leader in French hypermarkets and will accelerate its investments in price over the rest of the year.
US Tariffs are shifting - will you react or anticipate?
Don’t let policy changes catch you off guard. Stay proactive with real-time data and expert analysis.
By GlobalData“However, the deflationary consequences of these extra price investments, at the same time as a worsening macro economic environment, mean that we will fall short of our target of around 5% sales growth ex currency and thus fall short of our target of double digit growth in earnings per share,” Carrefour said.
In France, sales were flat in the quarter. Hypermarket sales fell by 2.6%. Stripping out the contribution of petrol, like-for-like sales fell 4.6%. This can be broken down into food, where like-for-like sales declined 5.5%, and non-food, where like-for-likes declined 2.8%. Supermarket sales in the quarter were up 5.8%. Like-for-like sales, including petrol, edged up 0.2%. Convenience store same-store sales were down 0.7%.
Carrefour said that in a challenging market environment, the sales performance of its European operations remains strong, with sales growth of 5.8% at constant exchange rates and like-for-like sales growth of 2.2%. Sales in Latin America rose 2.2%, while like-for-like sales rose 7.6%. In Asia sales rose 9.9%, or 1.7% on a like-for-like basis.
