Discount Stores Account for 20% of Modern Retail in Romania

Discount retail chains – Lidl, Penny and Supeco, now account for one fifth of the modern retail sales, after their sales went up twice faster than the market on average last year.

The three retailers posted 14.1 billion lei sales last year, 22% higher than in 2018.

“The pandemic has shown customers want their stores nearby, easy to reach, have parking space and they seek to spend as little time shopping as possible,” Frank Wagner, the executive who runs Lidl operations in Romania, said.

The discount stores were late to the market, but they are growing faster than the rest of the formats. Moreover, the pandemic helped such price-focused stores.

“The [market] share of the discount [retail] in Romania is lower than in the West.

If we follow the trend, the discount stores will become even more important locally,” says Daniel Gross, the Romanian executive who runs Penny network.

The discount retail accounts for more than 20% of the modern retail by public 2019 figures, gaining almost 2% on 2018, ZF has calculated from publicly available data. They account for some 12% of the total grocery retail, according to the same source.

Source: ZFEnglish

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