German Cerrato, director of the holding Cencosud's Shopping Centres Unit for Colombia, revealed that Cencosud will start to develop shopping centres in Colombia in 2016. He also noted that the holding currently has two shopping centres which were inherited when they bought Carrefour in 2012.
According to the newspaper La República, the executive said they had already evaluated seven possible locations, mainly in Bogotá and Medellin.
The news was announced during the Global Convention of Latin American Shopping Centres, which is taking place in Cartagena de Indias.
"We started expanding in 2007 with Easy, our home and improvement unit. We had a second strong expansion when we acquired Carrefour's supermarkets and assets, thus increasing our selling area by 500,000 square meters. After that, we acquired two shopping centres," said Cerrato. He then added that they "currently have a portfolio of land with strategic locations, which we are evaluating, and we have seven projects in the pipeline, we are evaluating those in terms of profitability."
The Chilean official also said that Cencosud is in a consolidation and profitability phase of the business plan. "I think 2014 and 2015 are going to be that way. We might have something more concrete in 2016. We have already started working on the preparation of these projects so I would say we're going to begin building them in 2016 or 2017."
Source: df.cl