---
title: "Carrefour's Tang Jianian: Seven Years in China, a Story of Success and Failure"
description: "This article reviews the seven-year tenure of Thierry Garnier as head of Carrefour China, detailing his achievements and the challenges that led to Carrefour's decline in China. It examines the factors behind Carrefour's exit from the Chinese market and what Garnier's departure signifies for his career."
author: "孙园"
publisher: "New Distribution"
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published: "2019-07-02"
language: "en"
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# Carrefour's Tang Jianian: Seven Years in China, a Story of Success and Failure

> This article reviews the seven-year tenure of Thierry Garnier as head of Carrefour China, detailing his achievements and the challenges that led to Carrefour's decline in China. It examines the factors behind Carrefour's exit from the Chinese market and what Garnier's departure signifies for his career.

Click to read the original article for details.
Source: Retail Boss Insider (ID: lslb168)
Author: Sun Yuan
**Carrefour made Tang Jianian, but Tang Jianian lost China.**
> **Core Guide:**
>
> 1. What did Tang Jianian experience as the head of Carrefour China?
>
> 2. After 23 years in China, where did Carrefour ultimately lose?
>
> 3. What does Tang Jianian's final decision to leave mean for him?
After Alibaba took a stake in RT-Mart, RT-Mart's chairman Huang Mingduan remained in his position, even showing a "youthful" spirit to continue fighting in the market (relative to his career stage).
After Suning acquired Carrefour China, Thierry Garnier, Vice President of Carrefour Group and President of Greater China, simultaneously announced his resignation.
This marked his 7th year in China, and predictably, his last.
Both are established hypermarket brands, both involved acquisitions by larger companies, but one retained its original management team, while the other's leader immediately chose to leave. The difference is not merely that one was a share acquisition (non-controlling) and the other a full acquisition. The key point is that **RT-Mart valued Alibaba's full suite of internet and digital resources, while Carrefour simply wanted to sell and exit the Chinese market.**
Two weeks ago, Suning invested 4.8 billion yuan to acquire 80% of Carrefour China. Last week (June 27), Tang Jianian formally submitted his resignation to Carrefour Group.
According to Carrefour China's official response to Retail Boss Insider (WeChat ID: lslb168), this move is unrelated to the equity change in Carrefour China. Tang Jianian will remain in China until this autumn (end of September) to oversee the transition with Suning's team as planned, with his successor to be announced later.
Meanwhile, an announcement by UK's Kingfisher (parent of B&Q) on June 27 showed that Tang Jianian would be appointed as an executive director of the board and succeed Véronique Laury as CEO of Kingfisher. The announcement also stated that Tang Jianian would join in the autumn and work at Kingfisher's headquarters in London.
**Carrefour and Tang Jianian: Mutual Achievement**
As the fourth president of Carrefour China and the last leader before the "sell-out," Tang Jianian joined Carrefour Group in 1999. Over his 20-year career, he rose from regional director to CEO of Asia.
**It can be said that in the retail sector, Tang Jianian and Carrefour achieved mutual success.** In 1999, after the French retail group Promodès, where Tang Jianian worked, was merged into Carrefour Group, he has been serving this largest retailer in Europe and second largest in the world.
**Along with Promodès, Carrefour also acquired its food and fresh supermarket format, Champion Supermarkets.** In 2003, Tang Jianian, who had been responsible for multiple operations management functions in Carrefour's French supermarkets, was appointed as Executive General Manager of Champion Supermarkets in France. Over the next five years, he successfully reshaped the Champion format into Carrefour's signature market model, which was rolled out to 1,000 supermarkets in France, generating sales of 13 billion euros.
Due to its success in France, the Champion format was quickly expanded to other global markets and gradually became one of Carrefour's three main business formats. According to public reports, by 2006, Champion Supermarkets had over 2,300 stores worldwide, accounting for 57% of Carrefour Group's total revenue, along with hypermarkets and discount stores.
With the success of Champion Supermarkets, in 2008, Tang Jianian began to oversee international business, including Southeast Asia, Europe, India, and international partnership projects.
This was also the starting point for Tang Jianian's move to Asia and the Chinese market. Due to his experience and performance in overseas markets, in 2010, he was appointed as President of International Emerging Markets Development and a member of the Group's Executive Committee.
Tang Jianian's career at Carrefour Group was on the rise, but at this time, Carrefour China was already showing signs of crisis. In 2008, due to inappropriate remarks about China by Carrefour shareholders, boycotts against Carrefour broke out in 30 Chinese cities. More critically, this boycott escalated from consumer actions to the policy level—losing the welcome of local governments, Carrefour China's expansion was no longer smooth.
At the same time, RT-Mart donated 50 million yuan to the Wenchuan earthquake relief, which was featured on CCTV's disaster relief gala.
Since then, Carrefour China's per-store sales began to decline, and in 2009, it was fully surpassed by RT-Mart. Public data shows that by 2009, RT-Mart's 121 stores achieved sales revenue of 40 billion yuan, with average per-store sales as high as 334 million yuan, while Carrefour's per-store average was only 235 million yuan, with 156 stores generating 36.6 billion yuan in sales.
But at this time, Carrefour headquarters still did not realize the severity of the problem. In 2010, Carrefour announced its withdrawal from Southeast Asian markets under a strategy to "focus on leading markets," and the Chinese market, with its impressive growth rate and EBIT performance, was seen as the future of Carrefour Group.
After Carrefour China's third president, Eric Leger, was promoted to Global Merchandise President, Tang Jianian, who had made achievements in overseas markets, came to China. **At this time, China's retail market was undergoing tremendous changes, and the hypermarket format, represented by Carrefour, was strongly impacted by the rise of e-commerce.**
Tang Jianian's takeover of Carrefour China was not well-regarded from the start.
**Was Carrefour's Defeat in China Tang Jianian's Fault?**
In 2012, Tang Jianian became CEO of Carrefour Asia and CEO of China, responsible for over 350 stores in mainland China and Taiwan. Tang Jianian had to face far more than language barriers and unfamiliar environments.
The continuous decline in hypermarket performance was obvious. As one of the first foreign retail enterprises to enter China, **with the fading of physical retail dividends, rising labor costs, and soaring store rents, coupled with external e-commerce impact, the wave of store closures began.**
According to Wan Mingzhi, then General Manager of Carrefour's Jiangsu region, 2012 was undoubtedly a watershed for Carrefour China. At this time, Carrefour's biggest rival, Walmart, after a five-year quagmire following its acquisition of Trust-Mart, finally surpassed Carrefour in both store count and sales after consolidation, and moved toward profitability.
But Carrefour's path of losses was just beginning.
As the helmsman, Tang Jianian's days were not easy. For this Frenchman, described by outsiders as "**kind, elegant, high EQ, intelligent, and very gentlemanly**," learning and understanding the Chinese retail market was not as traceable as learning Chinese or calligraphy.
**Taking office with the impression that "China is paved with gold," Tang Jianian's "reform" of Carrefour China came a bit late.**
At his first media appreciation meeting seven months after taking office, Tang Jianian listed "increasing investment in agricultural-supermarket docking, launching SME support programs, and enhancing food safety control" as the three most important plans for the near term. As for the impact of e-commerce, Tang Jianian's attitude was "**just do our own hypermarket well, e-commerce is not a concern**."
Carrefour China's real "makeover" only came in 2015. Three years after arriving in China, Tang Jianian had learned simple but fluent Chinese from scratch.
Shortly after the Spring Festival in 2015, after meeting with the heads of Carrefour's 238 stores in China, Tang Jianian proposed a new reform strategy for Carrefour China—**rebuilding the procurement and distribution system**, reorganizing 24 city procurement centers into 6 procurement centers, and correspondingly building 6 logistics distribution centers; expanding into third- and fourth-tier markets; launching the convenience store format Carrefour easy; and launching e-commerce business.
The above four measures are widely considered the biggest changes since Carrefour entered China 20 years ago.
**The reforms centered on procurement logistics, digitalization, and e-commerce did bring improvements to Carrefour China, but it was still a step too late.** Amid the turbulent Chinese retail market, the hypermarket model, including Carrefour, faced development crises, as did Walmart and RT-Mart.
Whether Carrefour would withdraw from the Chinese market, after repeated rumors and clarifications, was finally settled in 2019.
On June 23, Suning.com announced that its wholly-owned subsidiary Suning International would acquire 80% of Carrefour China for 4.8 billion yuan in cash, and stated that "within 3 months from the second anniversary of the closing, the transferor may exercise the put option to sell all its Carrefour China shares to Suning International" or "within 3 months after the end of the above 3-month period, if the transferor does not exercise the put option, Suning International may exercise the call option to purchase all the Carrefour China shares held by the transferor."
In most people's view, this was a win-win deal, but for Tang Jianian, who will focus on France after becoming CEO of Kingfisher, it means that his achievements in China and even Asia in his personal career are reduced to a few words in the announcement: "leading the company through complex transformation plans in a highly competitive and rapidly changing retail market environment."
For a "China hand," this is undoubtedly a great regret.


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