Carrefour lures West Africans from markets to malls

Bloomberg

Battered minibus taxis snake the perimeter of Ivory Coast’s latest shopping hotspot, a brand new mall in a sprawling Abidjan suburb that shows how grocers like France’s
Carrefour SA are turning their attention to lower-income African customers.
The parking lot reserved for car owners lies empty, contrasting with the throng of shoppers inside the crowded $30 million Cosmos Mall, which opened in October. They include Nafua Karamoko, a 30-year-old teacher and mother of two who has recently converted to the convenience of supermarkets from informal marketplaces.
“It’s clean, well-stocked and the prices don’t differ much from the local market where I normally do my shopping,” Karamoko said while filling her cart with Carrefour’s cooking oil, rice and frozen chicken.
Up for grabs for the likes of the French chain is a market with a formal retail penetration of 35 percent, meaning only just over a third of shopping is done in stores as opposed to marketplaces. That makes Ivory Coast the second-biggest promising retail center in Africa behind Kenya, according to a study by data analytics company Nielsen. Carrefour has three supermarkets in the country and plans to add as many as 10 more across Ivory Coast, Senegal and Cameroon this year.
“If we want to develop on the African market we can’t limit ourselves to one type of client or neighborhood,” said Jean-Christophe Brindeau, chief executive officer of CFAO Retail, Carrefour’s partner in West African countries that also include Senegal. In Yopougon, where Cosmos mall is located, “we’re targeting consumers with less buying power that still want to do their shopping in a clean and safe environment.”
The Ivorian economy, estimated at about $40 billion, is the biggest in Francophone West Africa and is expected to expand by 7.5 percent this year, according to the International Monetary Fund. President Alassane Ouattara has overseen a breakneck recovery since a decade of political instability ended in 2011, attracting investors keen to tap rising consumer confidence and major infrastructure projects such
as an Abidjan commuter train network and a toll bridge.