Marcos Iriarte Madrid

Madrid

Updated Wednesday, March 13, 2024-02:12

  • 2023 Results Mercadona increases its profit by 40%, exceeds 1,000 million and makes money for the first time in Portugal

"Our website is shit. It's not nineteenth-century, it's nineteenth-century."

Seven years have passed since this phrase by

Juan Roig

.

Seven years in which the company has managed to turn around its

online

strategy and its home delivery system after investing 150 million.

The online

channel

already represents around 2% of the group's total sales, about 650 million in 2023. And this may even seem little in a total pie of 35.5 billion, which is what Mercadona has invoiced this year, But as its president defended this Tuesday during the presentation of the company's results, "it is not an amount to be disregarded."

In 2017 Mercadona had a problem with its website.

The catalog lacked photos and was not very intuitive, so the customer - the boss, in Mercadona jargon - found it difficult to navigate through it to choose the products in their shopping basket.

But that was not what Juan Roig was most worried about, the most serious problem in his eyes was that the channel was not profitable.

The other way around.

"Apart from the fact that the website was very bad, we didn't make any money from it," explains Roig himself.

"Every store, every warehouse, every hive, has to be profitable, I believe that. And today we make money from Mercadona Online. Now we do."

In those days, for every home delivery that Mercadona made,

it lost 15 euros,

explains Roig.

Now, each shipment brings you five euros of profit.

"Now yes," Roig insisted yesterday in Valencia.

In 2023, the growth of this channel has been spectacular: with

20% more

turnover and about

four million orders

.

Behind this strategic shift is

Juana Roig,

the director of Mercadona Tech since that turning point that 2017 represented for the company and the person responsible for Mercadona's entire digitalization strategy.

The company then began a journey in which it has invested more than

150 million

and already employs 2,400 people.

400 more incorporated during 2023.

Under the mandate of its Tech director, Mercadona has established a particular system of

hives

, as it calls them.

These are warehouses that are used exclusively for online

sales

and that are located at strategic points for their demand.

It currently has six: in

Valencia, Barcelona, ​​Madrid, Alicante, Seville...

and the last one to arrive, in 2023, was the one that opened in

Boadilla del Monte

, the second in the community of Madrid, which also provides service to towns such as Alcorcón and Villaviciosa de Odón and that little by little it will incorporate important population centers such as Leganés, Parla or Tres Cantos into its line of action.

The areas under the umbrella of one of these six hives enjoy orders in two-hour sections, from 7:00 a.m. to 10:00 p.m., and from Monday to Saturday.

In addition, it is served from a web interface and an

app

with photos that is much easier to use.

In less populated areas and outside the radius of the hives, it continues to be served from physical stores.

At the end of 2023, the company kept the preparation and delivery service operational from 59 stores in its network, when in 2022 it only had 18.

Mercadona decides to install its hives after analyzing the population volume of an area, but above all its level of orders and the weight of its sales.

In

Zaragoza

or the

Basque Country

it has not yet taken the step of installing a hive, for example, since due to volume it would still be profitable and that is why it has reinforced the stores there that provide home delivery.

To carry these orders, Mercadona has incorporated a network of

720 ECO vans

to, as stated in its activity report, "contribute to reducing the volume of polluting emissions derived from this part of the process."

"And what will be the future of Mercadona Online? We don't know. That would be like looking into a crystal ball," said Juan Roig, but of course, not far from what he predicts for the rest of the company: "a future spectacular" fruit of "knowing how to make brave decisions, sometimes unpopular and annoying.