Discount Retail Chain Lidl's owning Schwarz Group CEO Gerd Chrzanowski was personally interviewed by Florian Kolf, a respected German Handelblatt retail journalist. DRC was asked by Handelsblatt to provide comments on the developments at Lidl.
"Lidl bremst gerade etwas die Expansion. Das Unternehmen ist in einer Konsolidierungs-phase“, beobachtet Marc Houppermans, Discount-Expert der Branchenberatung DRC Discount Retail Consulting GmbH. Investiert werde eher in Logistikeffizienz, um die operativen Kosten zu senken. "In vielen Ländern war das Wachstum so stark, dass die Prozesse nicht hinterhergekommen sind“, so Houppermans, der viele Jahre als Geschäftsführer bei Aldi Nord gearbeitet hatte.
Currently the Schwarz HQ campus in the region of Heilbronn, near Stuttgart, is considering the reinvention of the Schwarz Group. The once secretive trading group with the core grocery brands, Lidl and Kaufland, has stood for low prices for decades and irrepressible urge to expand. But also, for surprising changes in management and company culture that can be adequately described with the word “rustic”.
Now the Schwarz Group will become a data discounter as well. After several years of development, the family business started out as a competitor major cloud giants such as Microsoft and Amazon Web Services (AWS). No doubt: The 84-year-old company founder Dieter Schwarz wants to know it again. And prove that even a decades-old family business can reinvent itself again.
