SPAR China is set to open over 150,000m2 of retail sales space in 2019 with strong store development plans including compact hypermarkets and a new generation of supermarkets in Northern and Southern China. With new SPAR Partner licence agreements signed at the end of 2018, Russia will also continue to experience store expansion and sales growth.
A further two new licence agreements have also been agreed for the expansion of the brand in Central and Eastern Europe. And looking to the future and further afield, plans are at an advanced stage for the expansion of SPAR in South and Central America.
Tobias Wasmuht, CEO of SPAR International said: “Our strong network of SPAR Partners and supply chains across four continents gives the brand a competitive advantage in an increasingly global marketplace, while our multi-format strategy allows us to respond to changing customer needs.”
“Our continuous compound annual growth of 5.2 percent over the last three years creates a strong platform to build from for the future and indicates that our ‘Better Together’ strategy, launched in 2016, continues to deliver for the organisation, our partners and our customers,” Wasmuht added.
In Western Europe, where the brand has almost 8,000 neighbourhood and proximity stores, SPAR is well placed for future growth with large scale store modernisation projects ensuring continued standards of excellence. In Austria and the territories under the ownership of Austrian SPAR International AG (ASPIAG), an investment of over €660 million in expansion has included the development of a new generation of compact and fresh-centric INTERSPAR Hypermarkets, which are setting a benchmark for our SPAR retailers worldwide.
“As a result of SPAR’s ‘Better Together’ strategy, the brand has made good progress in the area of international joint buying and procurement. Our strategic objective is to accelerate this progress by further harnessing our international scale, pooling our global resources to reap economies of scale in all areas of our business and uniting our global partners to be and act better together,” Wasmuht said.
SPAR International reported another exceptionally strong year in 2018 with global retail sales of €35.8 billion for the year ending December 31st 2018, representing an increase of 5.4 percent on a constant currency basis. The results were announced at the 64th International SPAR Congress in Ljubljana, Slovenia.
2018 saw a year-on-year increase of 335 additional stores, bringing the total number to 13,112 SPAR stores in 48 countries worldwide, including entry into four new countries, equating to over 7.4 million square metres of sales area across all SPAR formats. The diversity of formats, expertly tailored to suit each market, along with SPAR’s inherent customer-centric focus which evolves as modern retail and supply chain technology solutions are adopted, all contributed to SPAR’s ongoing strong retail performance.
SPAR India ramped up expansion with the opening of six hypermarkets in 2018 and sales growth of 24.5 percent to €179 million.
