Carrefour has announced that it has launched an “ultra-fast” delivery service for Paris and Neuilly-sur-Seine. The service has been trialled since October in around 10 Paris districts.
Read MoreWal-Mart Stores Inc said on Thursday it will branch out into electronic commerce this year in Brazil, where it plans to invest 1.2 billion reais (USD 722.8 million) to keep up with fast-growing consumer demand.
Hector Nunez, chief executive of Wal-Mart Brazil, said the plunge into e-commerce will be a crucial part of the U.S. retailer’s growth strategy in Latin America’s largest country, where an economic boom is lifting millions out of poverty.
“We’re … entering into new channels, the most important being e-commerce that we will launch in the second half of this year,” he said at the company’s international analyst field trip in Salvador, in northeastern Brazil.
Nunez, who declined to provide further details on the e-commerce project, also reiterated Wal-Mart’s investment plans to open 36 new outlets this year in Brazil, almost twice as many as in 2007.
“We will continue aggressively expanding all of our formats,” he said in a speech broadcast over the Internet.
The discount behemoth has been focusing on expanding its international operations to supplement its U.S. business, where growth is slowing as it saturates many markets and now operates more than 4,100 stores.
The Wal-Mart Stores segment had net sales of USD 239.5 billion in its latest fiscal year ended January 31, up 6 percent from USD 226.3 billion a year earlier, while its Sam’s Club warehouse store division had sales of USD 44.36 billion, up almost 7 percent from USD 41.58 billion a year earlier.
Read MoreSophisticated web offerings from the UK’s grocery retailers are driving the growth of internet retailing in this country, making it the fastest growing online market in Europe, according to a new report from Mintel.
The report found UK online sales were worth euro 18.5bn (GBP 12.8bn) last year, compared with just euro 13bn in Germany, the next largest market.
And the UK was also the fastest growing market with sales up by 75% since 2005.
“The UK has by far and away the most developed online market in Europe,” said Richard Perks, director of retail research at Mintel.
“The main reason for this is the sophisticated online offering of the UK’s food retailers and the fact that so many of us now more than happy to turn to the internet to do our weekly shop.”
Tesco is the largest online food retailer in Europe, says Mintel, with www.tesco.com more than twice the size of its nearest rival (www.ooshop.fr) run by Carrefour.
Meanwhile, the latest figures from IMRG Capgemini showed a record GBP 4.3bn was spent online during February 2008.
Beers, wines and spirits saw a rise of 38%, perhaps in anticipation of the higher alcohol taxes announced in March’s Budget.
Read MoreNow might not be a great time to launch a financial services stock, but Italy’s national postal service — led by its booming banking unit — is gearing up for a float.
Having rewritten its history as a lethargic administration that could barely be trusted to deliver a letter in time, the post office was valued this year by investment banks at as much as 15 billion euros, said Sarmi. He declined to say which banks had provided the estimate.
That would make it Italy’s third-largest retail bank by market value at current share prices and is 50 percent higher than the estimated value Sarmi cited for the postal group more than a year ago.
And while billions have been wiped off banks’ market value globally by their loans to ‘subprime’ borrowers, analysts say the post office — which in a float would offer shares to both domestic and foreign investors — is a banking story that has succeeded by betting on the simple and safe.
Key to Poste Italiane’s business model has been a strategy of using its 14,000 outlets across Italy to offer bank accounts and loans, exploiting its reputation as a conservative player that has catered to pensioners and families for decades.
In 2006, about 67 percent of Poste Italiane’s revenue came from ventures outside mail.
“It’s not an exciting business but it’s profitable,” said Vetulli.
Poste Italiane has joined a broader trend of postal groups diversifying out of the low-margin mail business into more lucrative segments, as the rise of the Internet and email challenge the concept of traditional mail.
With banking also using electronic networks, postal groups have found it relatively easy to branch out — capitalising on numerous outlets that give them a market position other retail operators can only dream of, and an image of reliability.
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