Finnish Prisma Premiers in St. Petersburg
Finland's largest retailer, SOK Corporation, will enter the Russian market with its grocery chain Prisma. The company plans to invest ˆ300-500 million in Russia by 2013-2015 to open 15-20 stores in St. Petersburg and Leningrad Region (Kolpino and Pavlovsk). They thus expect to take up 10-17 percent of the local market. The first store will be opened in a 2500-sq. m. space in the Moscow Hotel in downtown St. Petersburg. Three to five hypermarkets will be opened by the end of next year. So far, the Finnish company has no plans to expand into other Russian regions.
SOK Corporation is part of the Finnish S Group, which owns retails chains (Prisma, Sale, SMarket), hotels (Sokos, Holiday Club, Radisson SAS), department stores (Sokos) and restaurants (Rosso, Sevilla and others). It is also involved in automaking and the production of agricultural equipment. Its consumer goods sales reached about ˆ6 billion last year with Prisma accounting for ˆ2.4 billion of that.
There are 51 Prisma stores in Finland, five in Tallinn and one in Riga. SOK Holding has already opened the five-star Holiday Club Hotel in Russia, and will open two four-star hotels, the Sokos Hotel Olympic Garden and Sokos Hotel Vasilievsky this year.
The St. Petersburg retail market was worth $12-17 billion in 2007, of which food chains accounted for $5 billion. Retail turnover in 2007 grew by 15.1 percent, compared to 13.9 percent in 2006. Analysts say, however, that Prisma is more likely to win 5-10 percent of the market that their optimistic estimate for one-fifth.
www.kommersant.com
All the Article in Russian as of Mar. 28, 2008
|
Photo: Sergey Mikheev
