Barış Oran: “We focused more than ever on offering the best to our customers.”
“WE ARE LOOKING AT 2020 WITH HOPE IN RETAIL THANKS TO THE INCREASING CONSUMER CONFIDENCE INDEX AND OUR STRONG TEAM”Acting as the Chairman of the Board of Directors of Teknosa and Board Member of CarrefourSA, Mr. Barış Oran evaluated the developments in the retail industry on the occasion of Retail Employees Day. Mr. Oran asserted in his speech: “The Turkish economy started to recover as from the second half of 2019. We can observe this recovery based on the consumer confidence index announced in the third quarter and the industry turnover figures of the retail industry. Particularly the Efsane and TeknoCuma campaigns had very positive reflections on the results. The industry reached 5 percent real growth in the third quarter. The most important data to support this growth is the increase in the turnover per square metre. The index indicated a 15.9 percent increase in comparison with the previous period, and our fields of activity, which were food retail and technology respectively, achieved 13.7 and 35.5 percent growth. Therefore, we expect to experience positive progress in our economy in 2020 in the light of all these data. When we consider the Group, we are seeing the results of our transformation programme in CarrefourSA. Our operational results have improved. We launched a similar transformation programme in Teknosa in the midyear and again started to get positive results. This, in turn, allows us to look at the future with hope.”
Mr. Barış Oran: “We will keep our sustainable growth in retail”
Mr. Oran highlighted that they had an opportunity to closely observe the habits of consumers and keep their finger on the pulse by carrying out business activities in the industry with CarrefourSA and Teknosa, and made the following statement: “We believe that we will maintain our sustainable growth at Sabancı Holding thanks to our experience in the retail industry and the devoted efforts of every single employee in the stores of CarrefourSA and Teknosa. We would like to take this occasion to celebrate December 12th the Retail Employees Day for all retail staff.”
“We made 30 million TL investments in 2019 and grew 13 percent in the third quarter”
Emphasising that Teknosa focused on multiple channel experiences, customer relationship management and data analytics in 2019, Mr. Oran noted, “We are the most extensive and physically the closest technology supermarket chain to customers in Turkey, with our 200 stores in 68 cities. We are capable of paying attention to and properly analysing consumers’ needs and responding to these needs quickly. We continuously review our business methods, processes, risks and opportunities and always try to find out “how we can do better”. This year, we accelerated digitalisation and transformation for the purpose of offering the best customer experience and operational excellence. Within this framework, we invested over 30 million TL. We host about 200 million visitors per year in our stores and teknosa.com. As Teknoa, we currently have 16 million single customer data records. We focused on improving the experience of our customers in all channels, offering the right product at the right locations, developing consumer traffic, enhancing the efficiency of our stores and optimising the stock and expenses throughout the year. Within this scope, we achieved 13 percent growth in the stores in terms of average shopping cart amount and the rate of conversion of customers and such a rate is far above the norm in the technological products market of 4.3 percent growth based on the sales in the period of January to September. 2019 was a challenging year for all industries, not only due to the problems in the global economy but also the problems encountered in Turkey and its surrounding geography. We have seen mobility for the last 2 to 3 months. We started the last quarter positively as such economic indicators as interest and exchange rate stability improved. I believe that the year of 2020 will be much better both for the Turkish economy and Teknosa.”
“There will be growth at CarrefourSA in 2020”
Mr. Oran made the following explanations with respect to the food retail industry: “As CarrefourSA, we started the year of 2019 with a target of 120 million TL investment in light of our vision of the “New Generation Supermarket”. We are leaving behind another year when we adopted a customer-oriented approach based on this target. As a brand offering products and services to 500,000 people per day with 630 stores in a total of 52 cities, we renewed our Hypermarket, Süper store, Gurme store and Mini store formats and put new stores into service in leading cities of Turkey such as İstanbul, İzmir, Kocaeli, Bursa, Mersin etc. We regard our stores as a living space; we keep making investments in our Lezzet Arası restaurants, the first one of which was opened in 2017 in the light of this vision. Today, we have 12 Lezzet Arası restaurants in total in Adana, Bursa, İstanbul, İzmir and Mersin. Another area of focus for us, in accordance with our customer experiences, is e-commerce activities. Upon the completion of our infrastructure investments, we increased our traffic by more than 100 percent and our sales by 101 percent and achieved more than 35,000 orders per month thanks to Carrefoursa.com which is our online shopping platform. In this way, we achieved 101 percent higher growth, in comparison with the previous year, for our total net sales last year. On the grounds that 80 percent of our 4 million visitors on average access us through mobile devices per month, we renewed our mobile application and provided easier access. We will make investment in 100 new supermarkets next year with the target of growing CarrefourSA. We will also open 4 new Lezzet Arası restaurants. We will focus on e-commerce, a rising trend in the digital world and enhance our accessibility on different platforms.”