Tesco 'eyes up Polish stores'

Tesco was today said to be lining up an €800m bid for nearly 300 supermarkets in Poland.

According to The Business newspaper, Tesco wants to buy the Polish stores of troubled French supermarket chain Casino.

Tesco is already the market leader in Poland with a 4% share of the market and 105 supermarkets.

The acquisition of Casino’s Polish operations would give it a further 279 Leader Price stores and 18 under the Geant name, although it is expected to face competition from France’s biggest supermarket Carrefour.

Casino opened its first Polish store in 1996 and last year Leader Price and Geant had combined sales of just over €8bn.

Casino is France’s second biggest supermarket chain and earlier this year it said it wanted to sell €2bn worth of its international assets to reduce debt.

It has operations in Brazil, Thailand and Vietnam but it is the Polish stores which are said to interest Tesco.

Poland is the biggest market in eastern Europe and Tesco already has plans to open 39 new stores there this year.

It opened its first store in Poland in 1995 and now has more stores in Poland than in any other country besides the UK, Thailand and Japan. It also has supermarkets in the Czech Republic, Hungary, Slovakia, Turkey, China, Malaysia, South Korea and Taiwan.

Around 2,000 of its 2,700 stores worldwide are in the UK, however, and Tesco banked profits of more than £2bn (€2.9bn) last year on sales of £37.1bn (€53.6bn).

The purchase of Casino’s Polish business would further boost its market share in Poland and stop Carrefour adding to its portfolio.

Earlier this year, Casino said profits at its core French operations fell 16% last year because of price pressure from Carrefour.