Company

Corporate Strategy

METRO Group

METRO Group is the world’s fourth-largest trade and retail group. Decentralised management, the aim to be the first to enter new markets, internationality, innovative business models and a global workforce that thinks and acts self-responsibly and entrepreneurially have made METRO Group what it is today. Our goal is to provide for a sustained appreciation of METRO Group’s value through profitable growth and efficient structures. This will benefit our customers as much as our shareholders, employees and society. As a successful company, we consistently live up to our social responsibility – for only a profitable company can be a socially conscious company as well.

Customer orientation
Position and expansion
Increasing efficiency

Customer orientation

We focus on our customers’ needs in everything that we do. We have to respond quickly and flexibly to customer desires. Our strong customer orientation builds on and extends METRO Group’s traditional strengths. Our greatest challenge remains addressing a wide range of very specific customer desires with the right formats and concepts. These concepts must be aligned with and leverage the living and buying habits of our customers, our customers’ customers as well as the respective markets’ degree of maturity.

Position and expansion

With its four sales divisions, METRO Group is well positioned for international success. The multi-faceted nature of our sales divisions and their broad international position act as a reinsurance policy that enables us to weather economic downturns relatively better than other companies. We focus on large-scale trade and retail formats. Metro Cash & Carry, Real, Media Markt and Saturn successfully operate in 32 countries in Europe, Asia and Africa and are set to continue on their expansion course, particularly through organic growth. Sensible acquisitions may support and accelerate this development.

Early recognition of and a fast response to global megatrends as well as regional developments are key success factors in our efforts to expand into new markets. We have the experienced employees and necessary business structures to do this. Factors like favourable population trends combined with anticipated economic growth and stable political parameters play a key role in our expansion decisions. These growth markets remain at the core of our long-term expansion efforts.

Our international exposure means that we simultaneously operate in markets characterised by highly different degrees of market maturity. While our sales divisions follow the same fundamental concept in all countries, our traditional closeness to local markets enables us to implement country-specific adaptations in a fast, pragmatic manner and thus foster customer loyalty and expansion through appropriate changes of format.

Increasing efficiency

The growing complexity resulting from METRO Group’s fast growth has prompted us to adopt the maxim "as decentrally as possible, as centrally as necessary". The degree of centrality is determined on the basis of clear, integrated or constitutive structures and centrally defined return targets. The sales divisions fulfil these requirements with a high degree of entrepreneurial freedom and strong market and customer centricity. Simplification and improved structures form the foundation of a sustained increase in efficiency and continued penetration of existing and new markets.