Metro Group Case Study

Metro Group is the Germany’s wholesale trade and retail group and a leading worldwide player with yearly sales of €55.7 billion as on 2005. The group is organized into four business units namely Real/extra (everyday retail hypermarket), Kaufhof(up-market department store chain),Market/Saturn (electronics retail chain) and Metro Cash &Carry (wholesalers). It C&C operates 544 stores globally and contributes 50.4% of the Metro group’s consolidated sales. Metro C&C started off in Germany in 1964 with just one store and through organic growth, expansions and mergers built a global brand in itself. It started off in 1960’s selling fresh foods and non-food items and later on in 1970’s fresh meat and fish were also added to its product list. In its

For the mayor, Metro C&C was a way of generating taxable income for the city and removing bottlenecks in supply chain and moreover Metro’s entry would reduce black market activity. Metro opened its first store in Moscow in 2001 and by 2006 mid it had opened 26 stores. It was not an easy path in Russia for Metro as it had to deal with lack of infrastructure especially absence of central highway system. Moreover, it also had to deal with logistics bottlenecks as cost of transporting goods was more in Russia compared to other countries due to poor road networks. It also had to keep in mind the growing competition in wholesale segment after accession to demands of WTO by Russia but Metro was confident enough to sustain in the long

Since, every new business model would face resistance from the existing players in market so it becomes imperative on the managers to take well thought out decisions so that their new business overcomes the challenges and this is what Metro Cash and Carry did and by its carefully devised strategy, mergers and planning it could establish itself as the global player in wholesale segment. Every market it entered it devised strategy according to the market condition and established itself in the market gradually and became market leader. The managers need to adapt to situations and deal with it accordingly and this is what the managers of Metro did whenever they entered new country. Hence, success of Metro C& C could be attributed to the effective and efficient decision making managers who could turn the tables even in challenging