German Rossman with 248 shops in Poland has become
the leader as far as the number of drugstores is concerned. Drogeria Natura (DN)
controlled by Irish-controlled Polbita fell to the second place. Today, it has
230 shops because a year ago it decided to close franchise ones.
“They were
unprofitable. We are going to launch only our own shops now”, Wojciech
Filipczyk, DN CEO said.
This year, 30 DN shops will be launched and 150
within 5 years so there will be over 400 of them.
“We want to have 280 at
the end of the year. We will launch several dozens shops annually in the
future”, Roman Lewandowski, Rossmann spokesman said.
While the
companies have similar number of drugstores, there is a huge gap between them as
far as sales are concerned. Rossman had PLN 1.3 billion (EUR 340.6m) of sales
last year and this year it plans to generate PLN 1.7 billion. Polbita had PLN
249m of sales. After 11 years of losses which totally amounted to PLN 80m, it
had PLN 5.7m of net income. Rossmann does not reveal its net income. Both
companies face bright future. Last year, the Poles spent PLN 9 billion for
cosmetics. This year, the amount will be 4-5 percent higher.
(PLN 1 = EUR
0.262)