CarrefourSA extends big mall in Istanbul

Güneş KÖMÜRCÜLER ISTANBUL – Hürriyet Daily News

CarrefourSA CEO Mehmet Nane is seen in the picture. Company photo

A big mall on the Asian side of Istanbul, Maltepe Park, was re-opened today after 21 months of extension works by its main investor, CarrefourSA, and the manager of the mall, ECE Turkey.

CarrefourSA, 50.8 percent of which is owned by Turkey’s Sabancı Holding and 46.2 percent by French Carrefour, invested around 70 million euros in the extension works of the shopping center with a total leasable area of 75,000 square meters, thus totaling around $2 billion investments in such projects in Turkey for the last 20 years.

“Maltepe Park has been renewed and extended according to the needs of the retail sector and people by using efficient strategies,” said CarrefourSA CEO Mehmet Nane.

There have been many discussions about whether more malls are needed across Turkey, especially in Istanbul. Such discussions were strongly heated during and after the Gezi Park protests. There are over 300 malls in Turkey right now, a majority of them are based in Istanbul, but around 24 malls had recently been closed down in Turkey as they could not attract shoppers and then retailers. Eleven of the closed malls were in Istanbul, and four were in Ankara.

“To be successful for a shopping mall, some basics must be considered: Purchasing power of the people who live around, shops’ rents and revenue of the investor,” said ECE Turkey CEO Andreas Hohlmann: “This must be a win-win game. Here almost all shops are rented because we negotiate each retailer on ideal price and we have met on middle way. We are lucky because we have such a strong partner here and we have already been running 189 malls in 17 countries. The shops in these malls work at almost 99.9 percent of fullness,” Hohlmann noted.