Europe's largest food retailer Carrefour has raised its cash flow target for this year as sales growth accelerated in the third quarter, especially in the firm's core French market. Carrefour's closely watched hypermarkets benefitted from their 'attractive' low-price offers as buyers grappled with inflation, the company said. Carrefour noted that it now expected free cash flow to come in 'comfortably above' €1 billion at the end of 2022, up from a previous forecast of 'at least' €1 billion, reports Reuters. Chairman and chief executive Alexandre Bompard told analysts he was confident over prospects for the fourth quarter. Carrefour was well armed to deal with an inflationary environment that would extend well into 2023, he added. Overall, business was consistent with the market consensus for full year 2022 operating profit, Bompard said, without citing a figure.
As consumers across Europe look to stretch their income as far as it can go over the next few months, many are looking at their shopping basket as the first port of call for savings, reports ESMmagazine.com. With this in mind, a recent INSEAD report on retail buying alliances uses the example of the AgeCore alliance (originally formed in 2015, and featuring Edeka, Colruyt, Coop, Intermarché, Conad and Eroski) to suggest that retailers belonging to a buying alliance provide cheaper products, across almost the entire store. INSEAD’s report, International Retail Buying Groups: A Force for the Good? The case of AgeCore/EDEKA, investigated whether German market leader Edeka’s membership of AgeCore led to lower consumer prices as a result of improved buying conditions, comparing shopper prices based on scanner data for a data set of over six million observations comprised of 138,000 SKUs from 20 food categories based on monthly observations over a six-year period.
McDonald's Corp beat quarterly comparable sales and profit estimates on Thursday, helped by higher menu prices and an increase in restaurant traffic from inflation-weary customers looking for value meals. The company's shares rose 2.7% to $263.58 in premarket trading. According to Reuters, like other fast-food chains, McDonald's has been forced to raise prices of its burgers and fries to keep up with surging commodity and labor costs, but its meals are still cheaper than eating out at dine-in restaurants keeping demand resilient even as consumer spending power gets crimped. Visits to the burger chain's US restaurants increased 6.2% in September, outpacing traffic to the broader quick-service restaurant space which rose just 0.8%, according to data from Placer.ai, a location analytics firm.
© 2022 Checkout – your source for the latest Irish retail news. Article by Donna Ahern. For more retail news, click here. Click subscribe to sign up for the Checkout print edition.
