The Coop Group grew strongly in 2022. But this is mainly thanks to catch-up effects in the Transgourmet wholesale sector. In the supermarkets, the sales from the Corona times could no longer be fully achieved.
Visits to restaurants have increased noticeably again. This benefits Transgourmet, but not so much the Coop supermarkets.
Coop’s sales figures for the 2022 financial year paint a picture of normalization after the two pandemic years of 2020 and 2021. The wholesale sector in particular is showing strong growth. There, the subsidiary Transgourmet, which operates cash and carry stores throughout Europe and supplies catering establishments, felt the opening of the restaurants. The acquisition of Transgourmet Ibérica (sales of around 1 billion euros) is also having an impact. With the acquisition, the company had gained a foothold in the Spanish market.
However, the downside of normalization becomes clear in the core business, the Coop supermarkets. This resulted in a considerable increase in sales of 8.8 percent compared to the pre-Corona year 2019. Nevertheless, sales of CHF 11.6 billion remained somewhat below the corona-related records in previous years (around CHF 12 billion each), according to a statement on Thursday.
During the pandemic, retailers had benefited from the fact that people mainly had to eat at home and that shopping abroad was not possible or only possible to a limited extent. In the largely “normal” year 2022, Coop was not able to maintain all of these corona-related increases, but a considerable part of them. It will be interesting to see how the supermarket business develops in the current year and how phenomena such as working from home may continue to have a positive impact on the checkout.
One development that has also gained momentum during the pandemic is online sales. The retailer now sells goods worth around five billion francs via this channel. However, this figure also includes wholesale online business, which accounts for the lion’s share. If you only look at the online supermarket Coop.ch, according to Coop, this accounts for only 2.5 percent of supermarket sales, which would be CHF 290 million.
Overall, the Coop Group generated sales of 34.2 billion francs in 2022 (plus 7.3 percent).
Coop will announce what all this means for the profit figures at the media conference on 14 February. The growth here is likely to be less significant than in sales. The retailer writes that one expects a “stable” result and justifies this with price reductions and the “strong competition”.