This is the second year of the new style European Rankings. The emphasis, as ever, is on the numbers and we provide a three year record of the main statistics (in so far as they are available) with a summary table of the 350 leading retailers in Europe as well where those retailers operate and what sectors they operate in.

The cut off point for inclusion is sales of a little over €400 million and it is our longer term intention to increase the scope of the report. Inclusion at the lower end is impacted by currency changes. The strength of sterling over the last year has increased the UK representation and will do so more when we get to the 2016 edition.

Report scope

This report provides a snapshot of the leading retailers in Europe, ranked by 2014 revenues. We cover the Top 350 European retailers and include country and sector sections, which detail those of the top 350 companies that are present in those markets. In the text we cover the main trends by country and sector and the leading retailers in each country and sector as well.

The European Retail Rankings is one of a series of Mintel reports looking at the retail sector across Europe. Its companion, the UK Retail Rankings provides a comprehensive overview of UK retailers with a cut-off point of around €7.5 million (£6 million). These reports draw on Mintel’s Retail Interactive database of leading European retailers: all the information in the European Retail Rankings is contained in the database, which is updated on a regular basis.

This report focuses on leading retailers only; for data on the performance of retail sectors across Europe and the macro-economic context, readers are referred to Mintel’s European Retail Handbook, 2015 or the key sector reports: Supermarkets – Europe - November 2015, Clothing Retailing – Europe - October 2015, DIY Retailing – Europe – May 2015, Beauty Retailing – Europe – January 2015, Electrical Retailing – Europe – February 201 and, Online Retailing – Europe – July 2015.

We focus on the key operational statistics and ratios: sales, profits, store numbers and sales areas. There are some companies for which we provide estimated figures – some companies that don’t tend to publish much detail on their results, such as Aldi, Lidl or Bauhaus, but also a number of private companies that are slow to publish figures of any sort. For some companies we have also been required to provide estimates for the latest financial year. Where possible, we work with published data and we make no adjustments to allow for different accounting standards. In practice, this means that retail profitability in Germany is probably understated relative to the Netherlands or the UK. But we have no basis to adjust for such discrepancies.

We must emphasise that the majority of data in this report is published. There are some estimates, but we try to avoid estimating where possible and we do not estimate profitability.

Readers should consult the section entitled Technical Notes and bear these differences in mind when using this report, but as far as is possible, Mintel has attempted to present corporate data that is comparable, one example of this is by excluding sales tax.

The data is contained in the accompanying databook.

Each table in the spreadsheet is structured in the same way. Each company can be identified by its overall ranking in Europe’s top 350 and that helps with cross referencing. For the overall Retail Ranking and the country and sector pages we give the following information

Country or sector ranking

Overall European retail ranking

Company name

Country of origin (see below)

Code for trading area (see below, not for country pages)

Code for main sector of operation (see below, not for sector pages)

Month of year-end

Retail sales (2012/13, 2013/14, 2014/15)

Operating profit (2012/13, 2013/14, 2014/15)

Operating margin (2012/13, 2013/14, 2014/15)

Number of stores (2012/13, 2013/14, 2014/15)

Sales area (2012/13, 2013/14, 2014/15)

Sales per store (2012/13, 2013/14, 2014/15)

Sales per sq m (2012/13, 2013/14, 2014/15)

We include data for any country that a Euro top 350 retailer reveals data for. The data is included in the spreadsheet (and includes one retailer active in Greenland), though we only include an overview for the following countries.

  • Austria

  • Belgium

  • Bulgaria

  • Croatia

  • Czech Republic

  • Denmark

  • Estonia

  • Finland

  • France

  • Germany

  • Greece

  • Hungary

  • Ireland

  • Italy

  • Latvia

  • Lithuania

  • Netherlands

  • Norway

  • Poland

  • Portugal

  • Romania

  • Russia

  • Slovak Republic

  • Slovenia

  • Spain

  • Sweden

  • Switzerland

  • Turkey

  • UK

The sectors covered are as follows:

  • Clothing

  • DIY

  • Electricals

  • Food

  • Furniture and carpets

  • Health & Beauty

  • Home shopping

  • Miscellaneous specialists

  • Mixed goods (includes department stores)

Technical notes

Inclusion criteria

The ranking includes the top 350 retailers in Europe, ranked according to their sales in 2014 (or the financial year closest to this). We have generally excluded buying groups from the analysis, but have included voluntary groups. The guiding principal is what it looks like to consumers. If it looks like a multiple retailer then it is included, but if it is a group of businesses that have got together to do no more than pool buying power, then it is not. On that basis Leclerc, Intermarché, Edeka and Intersport should certainly be included. We have also included Expert and Euronics, electricals voluntary groups whose strategy has been to develop as voluntary groups. But we have not included E-Square, which is principally a buying group.

Where a company has interests in sectors other than retailing, these have been excluded where possible. However, in some cases this has not been possible, and in these instances, this is marked with a note. When retail interests are only part of a company's activities, figures for pre-tax and net profits for retail activities are often not available. This can also lead to some distorted figures in terms of sales per outlet and sales per sq m, as is the case for companies with many franchisees.

The guiding principal is that the main business of the company is selling goods to consumers – ie they operate shops of home shopping businesses (or both). So we do not include wholesalers or cash and carries. The main exception to this is retailers that operate franchise networks or voluntary groups. Often the only information for such businesses is consolidated turnover and that can understate total sales at retail values by as much as 50%.

The figures given in this report relate to a company's operations in Europe only, which we define as including all of Western, Central and Eastern Europe, including Turkey (and Greenland). In some cases it has not been possible to identify an organisation's retail sales in Europe only. In these situations Mintel has either estimated the European element of the business or added a note that the figure includes some non-European sales.

Definitions

Sales are presented excluding sales taxes (see below for details of this).

Operating profit is trading profit after normal operating costs and depreciation, but before interest, goodwill amortisation and exceptional items.

Pre-tax profit is calculated after all costs, including exceptionals, interest, and non-cash charges such as amortisation, but before tax.

Where possible sales areas are quoted net, ie they exclude storage and office space. All figures are in square metres (m2).

  • To convert into square feet:1 square metre = 10.76 square feet

  • Sales per sq m and sales per outlet are computed on the average size/store numbers during the year, which helps to remove any distortions from a rapid opening/closure programme.

Rankings

All the company information in this report relates solely to the top 350 European retailers. It is these companies that have been analysed by sector and country, facilitating the sector and country rankings. It is important to stress therefore, that these sector and country rankings only include the players that rank within the overall top 350. So, for example, the table entitled Top 350 European Retailers in Denmark relates only to those companies in the European top 350 that operate in Denmark – it is not a complete list of all the top retailers in Denmark. Similarly, the tables in the sector rankings chapters relate only to those players in the top 350 ranking, and are not complete lists of the key players in each sector. Clearly, in many instances, this may equate to the same thing, but it is not always the case.

Note also that we are constrained by the information available. For many companies we do not have sales for local subsidiaries and we may only have store numbers – if that. It is also our perception that on the whole companies are becoming less informative. There are companies, such as Kesko, that seem to tell you everything, but often when two companies merge – as Dixons and Carphone Warehouse did last year, the result is a less informative annual report and accounts.

Within the main ranking – The Top 350 European Retailers – subsidiary trading companies are not included separately, but are subsumed within the parent company. Therefore there are no separate entries for example, for BCC (part of Darty, formerly Kesa), OBI (part of Tengelmann) or Media-Saturn (part of METRO). However, the detailed indexes at the back of the report will direct readers to the links between holding companies, subsidiaries and trading names.

Throughout the report, rankings are computed on 2014 retail sales (see comparability below). The overall European ranking is used in all the sector and country tables to aid comparisons.

In general the tables represent the status of companies in 2014. So where two companies have merged in 2015, we have treated them separately. But after this has happened and, say, a subsidiary has changed ownership it is positioned with its new holding company for the whole period.

Where applicable, we have amalgamated subsidiaries of the same parent company when active in the same sector or country to reflect the true standing of a retail company in a particular market.

Occasionally the sum of subsidiaries listed does not equal the total given. There are a number of possible reasons for this:

  • Information on all subsidiaries is not always available. As a result, in some cases we have an entry for the parent company and for selected subsidiaries only

  • Subsidiaries may have been divested after year-end. We present companies as presently constituted

  • Rounding of figures

  • Currency conversions, if original data for different subsidiaries was in different currencies (companies often provide information in local currencies)

  • VAT (sales tax) – if original data was provided gross (including sales tax), we have extracted VAT at the relevant rates for countries concerned and at the estimated appropriate rates depending on product categories sold.

A note on voluntary groups and co-ops

We use the terms voluntary group, symbol group, franchise or co-op in this report and it is worth just explaining what they mean.

There are two sorts of co-operative group in Europe. The first, seen most often in the UK, is a retailer that is owned by its customers. In effect this is therefore a multiple retailer and while it may have a different ethos, it is essentially a multiple retailer.

The second is a business owned by its retailers and this is the model of all the major co-operatives around Continental Europe.

A voluntary group, or symbol group, is a retail format operated by a holding company that retailers can join. When they do they accept the group’s fascia and agree to adhere to its rules, which include taking a proportion of goods from the central organisation, running its promotions and maintaining store standards. There are other services which are to some extent optional, such as store layouts.

Franchise operations are very similar to voluntary groups and far beyond the scope of this report to explain, though the conditions of a franchise agreement are much more stringent than for a voluntary group.

So with the exception of the UK co-operative model, these three operations are essentially very similar.

For the purposes of this report it is worth pointing out that:

  • Sales. The central organisation does not know what the sales of its members are. It knows how much it sells to the retailers and it knows the price at which it sells. But it does not know the price at which the goods are sold on to customers or the amount of goods the retailer buys in from other sources. So the sales which we report are an estimate put together by the voluntary groups themselves and we think are more likely to be an over-estimate than an underestimate.

  • Profits. The profit made by the central organisation is not a guide to the overall profitability of the fascia and we are not aware of any voluntary group that tries to estimate that.

Comparability

The compilation of a report such as this is a very complex task, primarily due to differences between countries in terms of financial reporting procedures. The main issues are presented below. Readers should bear these in mind when using the European Retail Rankings, but as far as possible Mintel has attempted to represent corporate data that is as comparable as possible.

All figures in the rankings tables are presented in euros. The countries currently in the eurozone are Austria, Belgium, Cyprus, Estonia, Finland, France, Germany, Greece, Ireland, Italy, Latvia, Luxembourg, Malta, Netherlands, Portugal, Slovakia, Slovenia and Spain. Lithuania joined the Euro on 1st Jan 2015. There have been some dramatic changes since the end of 2014, but we have not reflected these in the rankings. We take the view that the correct rate to use is the average exchange rate ruling during the year in question. However, at the beginning of December 2015 the Euro spot rate against the Rouble was 74.8, against the Swiss Franc 1.08 and against Sterling 0.72. The main non-euro currencies are converted using the following rates.

Figure 1: Exchange rates: National currencies against the Euro, 2012-14
Country Currency code Currency 2012 2013 2014
Bulgaria Lev Bulgarian lev 1.953 1.953 1.96
Croatia HRK Croatian Kuna 7.501 7.568 7.17
Czech Republic CZK Czech koruna 25.113 25.925 27.50
Denmark DKK Danish krone 7.443 7.458 7.46
Estonia EEK Estonian Kroon 15.647 15.647 15.65
Hungary HUF Hungarian forint 288.782 296.519 307.99
Norway NOK Norwegian krone 7.476 7.801 8.31
: : : : : :
: : : : : :
Source: Foreign Exchange Data Provided By Oanda.Com – The Currency Site

The companies are ranked on their total retail sales in 2014 or the financial year closest to it, ie financial years ending between July 2014 and June 2015. Most retailers have years ending in December, January or March, which means that the column headed 2014/15 approximates to the outcome for the 2014 calendar year and allows for proper comparisons between companies with differing year-ends.

All company sales figures are quoted exclusive of sales taxes (VAT). The issue of sales tax is a major obstacle to accurate comparisons of retailers from different countries, as there is no standard method of reporting figures. Most groups with directly operated stores usually report ex-VAT figures. Buying groups and voluntary groups mostly report inc-VAT figures. Few retailers give both figures. In order to facilitate comparisons across Europe Mintel estimates ex-VAT sales using the standard rate of VAT in the country of operation, adjusting where necessary for products (notably food and books), which attract lower rates.

Austerity budgets mean that a number of countries have increased VAT rates since the downturn in 2008.

Figure 2: VAT rates, 2011-15
01-Jan-11 01-Jan-12 01-Jan-13 01-Jan-14 01-Jan-15
% % % % %
Austria 20 20 20 20 20
Belgium 21 21 21 21 21
Czech Republic 20 20 21 21 21
Denmark 25 25 25 25 25
Finland 23 23 24 24 24
France 19.6 19.6 19.6 20 20
: : : : : :
: : : : : :

In more general terms note that accounting procedures vary considerably by country and that these differences in themselves make comparing companies from different countries a difficult task. Every country has different accounting standards due to differences in legal systems and business customs and these can affect how figures are drawn up. As an example, in Germany and France accounts are drawn up for statutory purposes and are the basis for computing tax. The UK model is fundamentally different: accounts are published for shareholders and taxation is controlled by law in a way that is independent of published accounts. Comparisons of profitability of companies using such different methods need to be treated with caution.

Classifications

The sector, country and region codes used throughout this report are as follows.

Figure 3: Sector codes
Broad sector Broad sector code Sectors included
Clothing/footwear clft Footwear
clft Clothing
DIY diy DIY
Electricals elec Electricals
Food retailers fdrt Food specialists
fdrt Co-ops
fdrt Grocers
: : :
: : :

The Country codes used are the internet codes used for each country

Figure 4: Country codes
Country Code
Albania al
Andorra ad
Austria at
Belarus by
Belgium be
Bosnia-Herzogovina ba
Bulgaria bu
: :
: :

Abbreviations

e Mintel estimate
p Provisional data
na Not available or not applicable

Sources

In compiling this report Mintel has drawn upon a variety of sources. These include published annual reports and accounts, other information direct from companies, trade press, local press, and other published sources of information, to which Mintel is grateful for permission to reproduce information. These include the following:

Dähne Verlag, European DIY Retailers

Kaeder I Dansk Detailhandel (Denmark)

Kehittyvä Kauppa Kaupan Tekijat (Finland)

Market Vem är Vem (Sweden)

Pianeta (Supplement of Largo Consumo) (Italy)

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