April 19, 2024

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[THE INVESTOR] Homeplus is set to open a new renovated hypermarket with warehouse features in Seoul, the second largest retailer in Korea announced on July 11.

The company will open a new Homeplus Special store as part of a new vision and business strategy, CEO Lim Il-soon said in a press conference.

“In March, I had announced our new vision and business strategy to satisfy the needs of our customers,” he said a day before the official opening of the new outlet.

The store aims to satisfy both consumers who seek low-priced products in large quantities and ones who prefer small, packaged items. The company has already opened two Homeplus Special stores in Daegu and Busan that have received a positive response from costumers, Lim said.

Some major changes have been made to the facilities for customers. The company especially emphasized that it has widened aisles by 22 percent to make it more convenient for customers to shop with their carts. Moreover, the retailer also provides 180- and 330-liter shopping carts to satisfy different needs.

The Korean firm also added that the changed operating system in the new outlet can decrease the workload of its employees. All the inventories are placed on shelves instead of being kept at its warehouse separately. “Before renovation, the employees had to go back and forth from the warehouse to the store, in order to prevent 40,000 to 50,000 products from being out of stock,” a Homeplus official said.

Additionally, the firm aims to open 20 more Homeplus Special stores throughout the country by the end of this year.

Owned by Seoul-based private equity fund MBK Partners, Homeplus runs 142 outlets and is the second biggest hypermarket here following E-mart, run by retail giant Shinsegae.

By Song Seung-hyun (ssh@heraldcorp.com)