Carrefour trades below €15 and is no longer in the global top 10

Carrefour loses half its value as hypermarkets fade

Going to a hypermarket costs a car, parking and an hour of your time. For decades that toll paid off; today it doesn’t. Carrefour, which in 2001 was the world’s second-largest retailer behind Walmart, has vanished from the sector’s top 10 and fallen to fifteenth. Its share price traded above €60 at the start of the century; now it is below €15, and over the past year and a half it has lost about 30% of its value. The format that made it big—the hypermarket—is exactly the one bleeding out.

Why are Carrefour shares trading below €15?

Because the market sees no future in its core business. The French company is studying every option to revive its share price, as Bloomberg reported: asset sales, a merger, an internal restructuring or even a full sale. There was already a buyer three years ago: Canada’s Couche-Tard put €20 per share on the table, valuing 100% of the company at €16.145 billion. The French government vetoed the deal.

Today, one of France’s national prides is worth less than €10 billion on the stock market. The gap between what someone was willing to pay and what the market pays now explains the scale of the erosion better than any report.

Hypermarkets fade: 1,182 stores and falling sales

At the end of 2023 the group had 1,182 hypermarkets worldwide: 204 in Spain and 253 in France. The French stores generated 48.7% of revenue in their home market, with €20.702 billion, equivalent to 22.4% of global sales. That figure was already lower than in 2022, and the trend continues: in the first nine months of 2024, sales at French hypermarkets on a like-for-like basis—the only market where they are broken down by format—fell 4.3%.

Market share confirms it. Carrefour is now the second-largest food retailer in France, with 21.4%, 2.7 percentage points behind the leader, E. Leclerc. In 2018 that gap was half a point. The rival isn’t cheaper by chance: it operates more nimbly and with more decentralisation.

Why have customers stopped going to hypermarkets?

Because the consumer changed before the store did. “People increasingly find it less interesting to travel to buy food,” summarises retail adviser Javier Pérez de Leza: proximity is prioritised, shoppers are turning to discounters and, if it comes to their door, all the better. The format is under attack on two fronts. In food, discounters and own-brand operators—Mercadona, Lidl, Aldi—are eating into its turf. In non-food, specialists are: Leroy Merlin in DIY, Decathlon in sport, Inditex in fashion, Ikea in furniture and Amazon in all of them at once.

The result, according to IESE professor José Luis Nueno, is that hypermarkets “are more food-focused than ever” and are competing exactly where they are weakest, against standardised, cheap formats. Along the same lines, Andrés Núñez of EAE Business School notes that customers find a very similar fresh-food offer in the corner supermarket and have stopped travelling for the rest.

The flight to the neighbourhood: supermarkets, convenience and discount

The company’s response has been to diversify. It has around 4,300 supermarkets and some 8,800 convenience stores, many franchised under the Express banner, more than 600 cash and carry outlets and 136 discount-format stores with which it is trying to compete on price. In Spain, that format operates as Supeco. Managing different ranges, prices and negotiations for each type adds complexity that rivals such as Mercadona or Lidl avoid by standardising a single model.

To gain proximity it has spent big: last year it acquired 47 Supercor stores from El Corte Inglés, and three years ago it took over 172 Supersol outlets. Spain is its third market after France and Brazil, and serves as a laboratory for that strategy. There are doubts whether all those purchases meet the three conditions the business requires: that they come cheap, are run better and generate synergies.

At the same time, the company has set a target for own-brand products to reach 40% of food sales, four points more than now. That is the box where those born with it have the advantage.

From the full trolley to the incomplete order

Losing customers is also played out at the checkout. Among the experiences circulating are those who stopped going because prices for the same product jumped from €4 to €7 between visits, and those who went from buying every week to going in “a couple of times a year and as a last resort”. Neglect of the store itself—mess, a sense of abandonment—appears in more than one account.

The online channel does not fix the problem. There are accounts of orders delivered half-complete, with no prior warning and the discounted item missing from the bag, while the rest of the shop is still charged. With logistics playing against it, online food retail becomes another open front rather than a lifeline.

Add to this a demographic shift that cannot be reversed: fewer large households, more people living alone and fewer cars in cities. The big full trolley in an out-of-town retail park is a ritual from another era.

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The balance sheet of the deal the French government blocked three years ago is the best summary of the mess. Someone offered €16.145 billion for the whole group. Today the market pays less than €10 billion. The national pride has got cheaper without anyone knocking on the door again.