You’ll find quite a few western European countries making sure they’ve got one foot in the door of the ‘emerging markets’ of eastern Europe. They overheads of operating a store in somewhere like Bucharest are miniscule compared to London (labour costs and so on are a fraction of those of the west), so they only need a very small wealthy elite to make the venture profitable. And it’s essential as part of a long-term strategy - after all, the other east Europe countries on that list are now in the EU, and Romania is headed that way.
Like any retailer, Marks & Spencer is looking for foot traffic, so think main shopping streets in city centers - for example, Oxford Street (which has two Marks stores) and Kings Road in London.
The company also has opened a number of food-only stores under ths Simply Food name in smaller city-center locations and other high-traffic areas such as railway stations.
I believe Marks has been called a department store elsewhere in the thread, but I’d argue that it’s better described as a clothing and food retailer (the company gets about half of its sales from each and has scrapped its homewares business). To me, a department store is John Lewis or Selfridges.
Regarding the overseas stores listed above. These are not directly owned by M & S but are third party franchise operations. All stores directly owned by M & S, in such places as France and Spain, were closed down and sold off a couple of years ago .
Not all M&S stores overseas are franchieses.
I direct your attention to this PDF document, the financial review section of the Marks & Spencer annual report and financial statements 2004. If you scroll down to the third page in the section titled “International Retail” you will see that at the end of the 2004 fiscal year, M&S owned 43 international stores and franchised 155. These figures are somewhat misleading as franchises tend to be significantly smaller than directly owned stores. The selling space of owned international stores was 908,000 square feet while the selling space of the international franchises was 1,068,000 square feet.
OK I stand corrected but they have significantly reduced direct ownership of overseas stores . This includes closing down the whole network in France , Spain and Germany and probably other countries as well.
I guess the important distinction here is the age difference between their traditional large-store prominent locations, most of which have been in use for many decades (and I believe are still accurately described as department stores) and the food outlets which are a much more recent innovation.
Looking more closely at that financial statement I get the feeling that the oversees retail operation includes the chain of Kings Supermarkets . I don’t know how many branches of this chain there are but there are only 43 directly owned stores worldwide including Kings.
There’s an M&S in Hong Kong. Is that owned or a franchise?
I interpret this statement in the 2004 financial review (see link above) as implying that the Hong Kong stores are owned by M&S directly:
The Paris Marks and Spencer closed a couple years ago, to the dissapointment of my mother, who used to shop there each time she came to Paris.