How it started
History
The first Carrefour shop (not a hypermarket) opened in 1960, within suburban Annecy, near a crossroads (hence the name ― carrefour means crossroads in French). The group was created in 1959 by Marcel Fournier, Denis Defforey and Jacques Defforey, who were influenced by several seminars in the United States led by Bernardo Trujillo.
The Carrefour group was the first in Europe to open a hypermarket: a large supermarket and a department store under the same roof. They opened their first hypermarket on 15 June 1963 in Sainte-Geneviève-des-Bois, near Paris.
In 1969, the company began opening its first stores beyond national borders, starting with neighboring Belgium. During the 1970s, it started developing its retail network across other continents as well.
In 1999, it merged with the Promodès group through a stock swap. On the Italian market, where it had been present since 1972, it acquired the Generale Supermercati (GS) and DìPerDì networks in 2000, progressively replacing their branding; from 2009, it began to focus on the central-northern area of the country. Its presence in the south developed mainly through franchising.
From 2008, Carrefour decided to invest in Eastern European countries (primarily Romania and Bulgaria) and China, reaching over 100 stores, and launched several openings in Russia and China with strategic consultancy from Citigroup. However, the expansion project in Russia was shelved in 2009 after the opening of a megastore in Moscow, an area that boasted a per capita income twice the national average but was, at the same time, a market that had reached the limit of its potential.
From Wikipedia’s article on Carrefour, shared under CC BY-SA 4.0.2