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
- Consolidated warehouses and supplier base and moved onto joint IT systems to enable cross-border commerce and remove duplicated cost
- Executed the migration roadmap including legal entity consolidation, asset and customer file transfer and organization redesign
- Results
- Implemented a harmonized multi-brand customer offering, keeping it lean and standardized where possible and localized where required
- Consolidated operations into one central company serving all countries with shared services across back office and front office, reducing structural costs by 50%
- Completed the restructuring within nine months and delivered an EBIT-positive outcome with a €6m uplift in the following year