"Growth potential increases at least three times." The KOLO store chain plans to open at least 100 new stores by the end of the year

Богдан Петришин

During the first day of the RAU Expo 2021, Serhii Voitsekhovskyi, a Member of the Board of Directors of BGV Group and Co-Founder of the KOLO Network, spoke about current trends in grocery retail and plans for network development.

By the end of 2021, the KOLO grocery chain plans to open 100-120 stores.

"In 2021, we plan to open 100-120 stores. We had plans for several M&A operations, but we decided not to close them this year," Voitsekhovskyi said.

He stressed all openings would be due to natural expansion. He also noted that the format of shops near the house is currently the most popular.

The main theses of the speech:

• The trend in grocery retail is the convenience of shopping. The second is that people prefer to eat rather than buy products, and the third is the growth of e-commerce and digitalization.
• In Poland, one self-service store serves 3.5-4 thousand citizens, and in Ukraine, it's about 10 thousand. The Ukrainian grocery retail market has the potential to triple compared to the neighboring country.
• When the network started operating in Odesa, the company was primarily based on such factors as the activity of housing development and tourism development. Also in Odesa, various commodity categories of local producers are vividly displayed.
• The specifics of the Ukrainian market in the absence of access to cheap money. The number of stores per capita in Ukraine is lower than in European countries, so the main investment budgets of all Ukrainian retailers are directed to expansion.
• It's important for the retailer to provide a service that should correspond to current realities.
• In any business, it's necessary to improve process automation so that the network can foretell better for more efficient development.
• Retail is a very conservative industry, where there are often no global changes in terms of innovation.

Voitsekhovskyi noted that the company did not use loans from Ukrainian banks. As a rule, the company attracts money from foreign banks or private investment.

All KOLO stores are launched in leased areas with a lease term of no more than five years.

Voitsekhovskyi called the number of new housing one of the indicators of the location choice for new stores.