Carrefour replaces CEO with former Nestle boss

Paris: Carrefour SA said yesterday it will replace its chief executive with a former top manager at Switzerland's Nestle SA, the culmination of long-simmering tensions over the French retail giant's performance and strategy.

Carrefour's board named Swede Lars Olofsson to replace outgoing CEO Jose Luis Duran, effective from January 1, the latest in a string of executive ousters at the top of France's corporate world.

Speculation over Duran's future at Carrefour, the world's second largest retailer after Wal-Mart Stores Inc., has mounted since last year when the company's long-standing top shareholder ceded its position to a consortium controlled by French billionaire Bernard Arnault and a US private-equity firm, Colony Capital.

In July, shareholders had voted to change the company's management structure, creating a board which excludes Duran.

Blue Capital, the consortium controlled by Arnault and Colony Capital, last year took a 9.1 per cent stake in Carrefour and urged the company to unlock the value of its real estate.

No surprise

"It's not much of a surprise, it's been a long time that Jose Luis was under pressure," said Christopher Hogbin, senior retail analyst at BersteinResearch in London.

Investors will be reassured by Olofsson's appointment because of frustration over the slow pace of change at Carrefour, Hogbin said. But a change of CEO is no cure-all for the company's problems, he added.

"Carrefour still has the problem that it has (now): lots of hypermarkets in France - hypermarkets are a low- or no-growth format," Hogbin said.

Duran's ouster is the latest in a string of recent executive shake-ups in corporate France. In September, Alcatel-Lucent appointed former BT chief executive Ben Verwaayen to replace outgoing CEO Patricia Russo, and pharmaceutical giant Sanofi-Aventis said it would hire Chris Viehbacher to take over as chief executive from Gerard Le Fur on December 1.