Ordinary Gweilo

These days, if you visit a large shopping mail in Hong Kong, Singapore, Thailand or many other Asian countries, you are likely to see many familiar international names. Tesco, Marks & Spencer, Ikea, Toys R Us, Carrefour, Wal Mart, HMV and many others have established themselves in the region. Some operate independently, others have significant local partners. There have, of course, been some failures along the way – Carrefour never got a foothold in Hong Kong and eventually gave up. BHS (once known as British Home Stores) also abandoned Hong Kong, as did Virgin Records. M&S tried to find a local partner to run its Hong Kong stores, then changed its mind and ‘localised’ the management instead.

Boots is a very well-known retail chain in the UK that has diversified away from its original roots as a chemist (pharmacist, drug store) and recently ran into a few problems in the UK (from which it finally seems to be recovering). What I hadn’t realized was that they were also expanding internationally.

So when I first went to Bangkok, I was rather surprised to find a small Boots branch in the shopping arcade that adjoined the hotel (a rather less than prime location). It turned out they had quite a lot of branches around the city, though they didn’t seem to be particularly successful. It came as no surprise that last year the management in the UK decided to cut their losses in Thailand and shut many of the outlets. Around the same time they set up a deal with Watsons to sell a limited range of Boots brand products in a fairly small number of stores in Hong Kong and Taiwan.

So I was rather surprised to read this in The Guardian:

Boots ambitious overseas division, retail international, reported a sales increase of 16.1%, with 17 new branches opening in Thailand and 15 in Hong Kong.

That didn’t sound right. So I checked their official announcement:

17 new implants were opened in Taiwan and 15 in Hong Kong. Like for like sales in Thailand were up 16%.

The journalist somehow managed to confuse Taiwan and Thailand and thought that “implants” meant new stores. Not so clever.

Further research reveals that in Thailand they are partnering with TOPS supermarkets and closing most of their own stores. This 16% “like for like” increase presumably means that they focused on a smaller number of stores and managed to increase sales there, but the overall sales growth must have come from “implants” (horrible word) in Hong Kong and Taiwan. Not a bad achievement, but I think “modest” might be a better word for their strategy rather than “ambitious”.