But he will need all the skills as a conciliator and decentraliser that he learned when sorting out Carrefour, France's largest retailer.
It hatched plans to build itself into a big, diversified mining company only in 2001.In this section Valuable Vale Days of wine and tulips LG's woes Exit Carrefour Screen test Wild is the wind Pointers for predators Where print makes profits The wiki way ReprintsHowever, it has not yet diversified much beyond iron ore or its home country.
Wind firms face their first recession.In this section Valuable Vale Days of wine and tulips LG's woes Exit Carrefour Screen test Wild is the wind Pointers for predators Where print makes profits The wiki way ReprintsThe credit crunch does not help.
Until the share price recovers, the Halleys want Carrefour to stay independent.
Heavy immigration, mostly from the Maghreb and then sub-Saharan Africa, began to change the character of the "carrefour Barbès", where three central arrondissements touch the 9th, 10th and 18th.
It was a step in the right direction but cost a bomb, says Natalie Berg of Planet Retail, a consultancy: the fancy stores cost twice as much as traditional Carrefour outlets.What French shoppers crave, however, is lower prices.
And it super-charges innovation: crowds of people can develop new ideas faster than isolated geniuses and disseminate them even faster.In this section Valuable Vale Days of wine and tulips LG's woes Exit Carrefour Screen test Wild is the wind Pointers for predators Where print makes profits The wiki way ReprintsMr Tapscott and Mr Williams have now written a follow-up to their bestseller.
BP has just announced that the net proceeds from the $9 billion sale of its petrochemical unit will go straight to shareholders.In this section The battle of the portals Death by red ink Starting to splurge All aboard the lunatic express Made for each other Flights of fantasy Carrefour at the crossroads Consulting in the right direction ReprintsAnd yet, belatedly, the mood seems to be changing.
Today shoppers can find low prices and infinite choice online, so fewer bother to drive to an out-of-town hypermarket.European demography hurts Carrefour, too.
"Hypermarkets are not dead, but they are outdated," says Natalie Berg at Planet Retail, a research firm.Mr Olofsson has invested hundreds of millions of euros in a revamp called "Carrefour planet".
But as long as they do, they should win.The first to realise this opportunity, in the mid-1990s, was Carrefour.
