Bulgarian home delivery firm BG Menu plans countrywide expansion
BG Menu, a Bulgarian home delivery company, plans to expand outside the capital Sofia next year to bank on the growing awareness of its services in the country, a senior company executive said on Tuesday.
“This business is doubling in every three months,” BG Menu’s CEO Vladimir Davchev told a news conference where he presented the company’s new Web-based ordering system, developed together with Bulgarian web portal operator Netinfo.
Davchev said that BG Menu has attracted 7,000 regular clients since its launch in April but potential clients were many more.
BG Menu has so far invested some 500,000 levs ($307,500/255,700 euro), mainly to buy delivery vehicles and to develop software, which allows real-time orders management. The company is already profitable and expects that the investment would be repaid by March 2006.
“Bulgarians start to realise the advantages of home deliveries, which save time, money and problems,” Davchev said.
The company plans to expand next year to the large Bulgarian cities where most of its retail partners, like Billa and Shell, have units. It has also received proposals to expand in Greece and Turkey, said Davchev but did not elaborate.
Over 60% of the Internet users in Bulgaria are common with home deliveries of food, but just nine percent use the Internet to order, according to a survey conducted by BG Menu and Netinfo.
The growing awareness of online services is likely to convert potential clients into regular users of online home delivery, Bogomil Iliev, Netinfo’s products and business development manager, told the same press conference.
BG Menu’s web-based delivery system allows clients to use services ranging from food delivery to dry-cleaning.
Overall 23% of adult Bulgarians used the Internet in late 2004, up from 16% in mid-2003, according to a survey of Sofia-based polling agency Alfa Research.
(1 euro = 1.95583 Bulgarian levs)
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