Dutch budget ready-to-wear retailer C&A is considering cutting more than 300 jobs and closing 24 branches in France in order to “improve competitiveness,” the retailer told the AFP agency on Friday.
A C&A store in France – C&A
C&A’s restructuring effort, not the first it has undertaken in France, is designed to “ensure the future of the brand within a French apparel market that is constantly deteriorating, and on which C&A France has been experiencing difficulties despite previous interventions,” said C&A.
The retailer currently operates 100 stores in France, where it has 1,500 employees, to whom the restructuring plan was disclosed on March 14.
“C&A is introducing job protection plans in the same way it introduces end-of-season-sales,” said the CGT union in a statement, underlining this would be the “eighth such plan,” and that 800 jobs had already been lost in recent years.
The 24 stores whose closure is envisaged are experiencing “structural difficulties,” and all 57 C&A corners at other French retailers are set to suffer the same fate, “since [C&A] has been unable to renew its commercial partnerships with Intermarché, Carrefour and Auchan,” said the Dutch retailer.
The same source said that, given product volumes in France are expected to decrease, C&A will also downsize its logistics hub in the Paris region.
“In total, the proposed plan… would result in a maximum of 324 redundancies,” said C&A.
In the “coming weeks,” C&A added, “a very comprehensive employee support scheme will be negotiated” with union representatives, including redeployment opportunities and related measures.
The plan “is part of C&A’s Europe-wide strategy aimed at ensuring the company will continue to do business,” by better meeting consumer needs and becoming profitable again, emphasised the 184-year-old retailer’s management.
In 1841, the brothers Clemens and August Brenninkmeijer set up a linen and cotton business called C&A Brenninkmeijer in Sneek, the Netherlands. The company began to specialise in ready-to-wear in 1890, and opened its 1,000th store in 2006.
C&A currently sells low-cost women’s, men’s and children’s apparel through 1,300 branches in 17 European countries, and employs 25,000 people.
