Shelves are empty, staff are leaving, and Carrefour’s China operations — sold in 2019 by the French retail giant to Chinese white goods conglomerate Suning.com — is ready to breathe its last in China after 28 years. Blame ecommerce and COVID.
Convenience stores in Japan and Taiwan have long offered their customers everything from beer and soft drinks to an amazing variety of freshly cooked food. The Japanese chains and their local knockoffs have grown rapidly in China in the last two decades, but now tech companies are aggressively moving into their turf.
Indebted Suning wants to independently IPO the retail chain it bought from French hyperstore giant Carrefour just 18 months ago.
Also in this week's China Sports Column: Mitt Romney calls for "economic" — not athletic — boycott of Beijing 2022.
China’s ecommerce market is complex, massive, and highly competitive. Its companies and their business models are completely different from those in other markets, and none of the big American and European players have any real presence. This is a guide to the major Chinese players and their offerings.
Alibaba and DJI, facing a slowdown in the growth of ecommerce, are turning toward physical stores, which can offer customers hands-on explorations of products and loyalty-engendering customer service. "In the coming years, we anticipate the birth of a reimagined retail industry, driven by the integration of online, offline, logistics and data,” wrote Jack Ma, Alibaba's co-founder, in a note to shareholders in October.