Carrefour, Mastrolia speaks after the NewPrinces heist: 'Here are my plans in the large-scale retail trade'

Not even a dayafter the announcement of the takeover of Carrefour Italia, and NewPrinces' share price collapses at Piazza Affari: yesterday it dropped as much as 11%, and then closed at EUR 19.40 per share, marking a drop of 9.35%. But Angelo Mastrolia, president of a company that in just one year will go from 750 million to 6.9 billion euros in turnover, is not at all worried: 'The market does not always understand operations immediately,' he says, 'it has happened to me in the past, when faced with other acquisitions made by the group, and in the end the market had to agree with us.

Since 2024, the former Newlat has made several acquisitions: first the British canning giant Princes, then Plasmon and last Thursday the Italian operations of the French Carrefour, with its 1,027 shops. All these realities are to be added to the food brands that the group already had in its portfolio, from Delverde pasta to Centrale del Latte, from Giglio taken over from Parmalat to Polenghi. With this latest operation, NewPrinces becomes the only Italian group to include both food production and large-scale distribution under its umbrella. How will the rest of the agri-food producers, who risk suffering unfair competition on the shelves of the new Carrefour, take it? 'No dumping effect,' Mastrolia assures us. 'We will guarantee our customers the same treatment and offer our products at the same prices as we offer them in other large-scale retail chains.

If a player that brings together production and distribution is a white fly on the national scene, it is nothing new abroad: 'In Switzerland,' says the president of NewPrinces, 'two big supermarket players like Migros and Coop already control the entire process from production to distribution, and Lidl is also thinking about it. We are inspired by this model, and also by the history of Luxottica, although this is a different product sector. Thirty years ago Leonardo Del Vecchio was only an eyewear manufacturer, but he fulfilled his destiny when he realised that he also had to have his own network of sales outlets'.

When fully operational, NewPrinces aims to directly manage 80 per cent of the sales outlets taken over from Carrefour, which will be refurbished in three years and return to the Gs brand. 'I believe that the greatest potential of this operation lies in two businesses,' says Mastrolia, 'one is home delivery, because we are very strong in large cities and already have well-developed logistics. The other segment I am betting on is the horeca (hotellerie-restaurants-cafés, ed.), a world that we are already used to serving with our milk-based products, and towards which we will strengthen our offer'. Then there is the private-label business: having its own supermarkets will allow NewPrinces, according to its management's plans, to double its share of private-label turnover.

Carrefour's business in Italy was not healthy, but even this does not frighten Angelo Mastrolia: 'The fact that the French retailers, and I am also referring to Auchan, were not able to manage the Italian market does not mean that it was a loss-making business. We were not the only ones to bet on Carrefour, which eventually chose us because we offered zero antitrust risk, took all the shops and allowed them to exit the market quickly, leaving only a dowry of 237 million for the industrial relaunch. What they feared most was a long, difficult and expensive exit, as happened to Auchan'.