Quietly, the French retail giant is in the process of parting with some of its least profitable hypermarkets. A Moroccan businessman is in ambush.

Apparently nothing has changed. The letters of the Carrefour name still appear on the pediment of the huge Grand Littoral shopping center, not far from the northern districts of Marseille. On the shelves, always the same promotions on detergent cans, beer packs or baby diaper packs. But if they continue to don the distributor’s azure blue T-shirt every day, the 400 employees of this 16,000 square meter hypermarket no longer really work for the French distribution giant. Since the beginning of May, their management is no longer installed in the large glazed offices of the headquarters of Carrefour in Massy in the southern suburbs of Paris, but on the other side of the Mediterranean, in Rabat, in Morocco. A 61-year-old businessman, Zouhair Bennani, the prince of the Moroccan supermarket with his company Retail Holding and his Label’Vie brand, has officially recovered the keys to this temple of consumption.

Grand Littoral is his new take. In recent months, through a rental-management system, the billionaire has also got his hands on the Carrefour hypermarket in Parinor in Aulnay-sous-Bois (312 employees), those in Echirolles in the suburbs of Grenoble ( 320), Vitrolles (462), Port-de-Bouc (170) and Bonneveine (150) in Marseille. He would be about to sign Beaucaire, in the Gard, and especially two other jewels of the large distribution in Ile-de-France: Bercy and Belle-Epine. A raid that would slowly bring him to 2000 employees…

Carrefour Hypermarkets lost another 424 million euros in 2020
Behind the arrival of Zouhair Bennani, a form of restructuring of the tricolor brand is taking place quietly. In bright red for several years, Carrefour Hypermarkets, the holding company dedicated to this segment, lost another 424 million euros in 2020 while it achieves more than 14 billion euros in net turnover. At a time when the hypermarket model is in doubt, Alexandre Bompard, CEO of Carrefour, has found in rental management the solution to get rid of its less profitable brands. No store closings. No social plan, no wave for the one who, in recent months has sought to marry Carrefour with its competitor Auchan or with the Canadian Couche-Tard. “With this sleight of hand, the tricolor group outsources the losses,” observes distribution specialist Olivier Dauvers.