Integrated portfolio companies for profitable cross-border commerce
Case study:
Integrated portfolio companies for profitable cross-border commerce
- Situation
- Multiple banners within one international retail group operated as separate companies across countries, serving similar customer segments
- All banners faced heavy profitability pressure and cash drain, leaving no headroom for urgently needed modernization investment in logistics, IT and digital touchpoints
- No synergies were captured across assortment, marketing, IT and logistics, with each unit running its own setup
- Actions
- Defined a unified commercial concept with clear assortment, pricing and campaign logic, then localized only where brand awareness, product preferences or local regulation required it
- Designed an operating model with shared services and a central supply chain, keeping buying centralized while dedicating marketing to each commercial concept
- Prepared warehouse and supplier consolidation and migration to joint IT systems to enable cross-border commerce and eliminate duplicate costs
- Prepared the migration roadmap, including legal entity consolidation, asset and customer file transfer and organization redesign, and initiated the first integration measures
- Results
- The client subsequently led operational implementation and introduced a harmonized multi-brand customer offering, lean and standardized where possible and localized where required
- Operations were consolidated into one central company serving all countries with shared services across back office and front office, reducing structural costs by 50%
- Restructuring was completed within nine months and led to positive EBIT, with a €6m increase in the following year