BIM: Finding New Ways to Grow

By: Gamze Yucaoglu and Michael Chu

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Synopsis: BIM, Turkey's giant retailer with a hard-discount model for the popular segments, must decide whether to launch a brand-new format challenging the modern supermarkets. Since its founding in 1995, BIM has adhered to a business model based on a relentless focus on costs and operational efficiency, built on private labels and an unswerving limit on SKUs. Unprecedented in Turkey, the success of this retail concept propelled BIM to an IPO in the Istanbul Stock Exchange and to being the country's largest retail company by market capitalization. Seeing an opportunity to pioneer the format internationally, the company was now also in Morocco and Egypt. While the hard-discount format was still growing, in 2014 Haluk Dortluoglu, the company's CFO, began to develop an entirely new retail model for Turkey- FILE, a discount supermarket. FILE would carry many more SKUs in larger stores and compete head-to-head with national and local supermarkets. Throughout the year, in their various executive committee meetings, the senior executives of the company have debated the many issues posed by a totally different retail format and the advisability of launching it. Finally, in its first meeting of 2015, the company's board of directors are set on reaching a decision on FILE.