Carrefour Brasil closed 123 stores and posted a R$795M loss in the Big cleanup

Carrefour Brasil posted a net loss of R$565 million in the fourth quarter, against a R$426 million profit a year earlier, and a full-year 2023 loss of R$795 million versus a R$1.73 billion profit in 2022. The reason, the company said, was sitting in its balance sheet: the closure of 123 unprofitable stores within the restructuring of Grupo Big, plus the finalisation of deficit hypermarkets whose performance it could not reverse.

The closure list: 16 hypermarkets, 94 Todo Dia stores and 13 Nacional and Bom Preço units. From October to December the company closed 11 supermarkets; by the end of January 2024 it had closed 93 more (16 hypermarkets and 77 supermarkets), with 19 further definitive closures due by the second quarter.

The operating picture explained the surgery: fourth-quarter net revenue slipped 0.3% to R$28 billion, same-store sales fell 5.5% in retail and 1.8% at Atacadão, and fourth-quarter EBITDA fell 5% to R$1.87 billion with the margin down 0.3 points to 6.7% — now including the acquired Big operations. For 2023 overall, net revenue rose 6.7% to R$103.9 billion but EBITDA margin fell 1.3 points to 5.5%.

The acquired Big estate came with a long tail of stores in formats — hypermarkets, cash-and-carry conversions — that overlapped Carrefour's own network and bled cash.

Same-store sales fell in both retail (-5.5%) and Atacadão (-1.8%) while integration costs hit, so the losses compounded rather than diluted.

Taking all closure impacts into the 2023 accounts was the explicit choice to clean up in one cycle rather than bleed through several.

Buying a distressed chain is the cheap part: the bill arrives as closure charges and lost quarters when the acquired estate's worst stores cannot be turned around.

By end-January 2024, 104 of the 123 closures had been executed, with the remaining 19 due definitively by the second quarter of 2024 as the Big restructuring continued.