ANGLAIS
DEVOIR N°3

PARTIE 1 : Restitution d’un document :

This document is an article from The Economist newspaper, written on April 16th 2005, entitled “Growing pains”. This article deals with the difficulty for big local retailers chains, to expand overseas.
Despite the success of those local retailers in their own countries, why have they difficulties to expand abroad?
We have to see first of all the local differences, and then we will see the financials consequences. The article takes the examples of the famous retailers Wal-Mart (from America), Carrefour
(from France) and Tesco (from Great-Britain).The first problem of expanding overseas is to be able to adapt to the local culture. Indeed as the article said, “what works in a country does not necessarily work in another”. For instance, the biggest retailers Wal-Mart has difficulties to expand in Japan because-the- Japanese associate low prices with poor quality. So the discount concept cannot be export-ed- in all the countries. Moreover, Wal-Mart has problem in his-its- own country,-the- United States, because it is a non-union firm which is a problem there. We see also that local differences are important factor to expand overseas. In Great-
Britain, to conform to the market where Tesco is the number one, Wal-Mart created the Asda chain so that-as- to be-a- competitor with the local market.
As for Carrefour which is the most international retailer, the losses it had overseas oblige himthem- to quit some countries or to sell its-their- stores like he-they- did in Japan or in Mexico where he-they- want to sell about twenty nine stores. Jose Luis Duran the chief executive of
Carrefour said that the retailer chain will quit all the stores where it isn’t among the best. Sir
Terry Leahy who is the boss of Tesco emphasized the fact that-it- is very difficult to create an international retailing business.
As for Tesco, Sir Leahy said that the Asian market is future. Indeed most of