With the arrival of the confinement due to the pandemic, businesses of all kinds saw the opportunity to expand online by offering their products and/or services online and delivering them to customers’ doors. In Latin America, a successful case of this practice was Éxito, a chain of supermarkets and hypermarkets in Colombia that, since its opening in 1949, has advanced over time to become one of the most famous in its country of origin with a clear presence in the online world.
The supermarket chain was inaugurated by Don Gustavo Toro in Medellín, Colombia and has since been part of the Éxito Group, a multinational known for being a conglomerate of companies in the supermarket sector. The first store that opened as part of this conglomerate was Carulla in 1905 in the city of Bogotá; the second was Ley, which began operations in 1922 in Barranquilla; and then Éxito in 1949. Today, the Éxito Group has positioned itself as a leader in retail, having a presence in Colombia, Uruguay, and Argentina.
In 2021, Grupo Éxito reached 16.9 trillion Colombian pesos (3.5 billion dollars) in operational revenue, representing a growth of 7.5% compared to 2020. During this year 2022, from January to September, the conglomerate of companies has recorded 14.4 trillion Colombian pesos (3 billion dollars), representing a growth of 23.4% compared to the 11.6 trillion Colombian pesos (2.4 billion dollars) reported in the same period of time in 2021.
Specifically speaking of the Éxito supermarket, it was inaugurated on March 26 in a 4×4 square meter location on Alhambra Street #47-07, in the center of Medellín. It currently has a presence in almost all of Colombian territory with 390 stores distributed in 175 municipalities.
Although it is known and defined as a supermarket and hypermarket chain, the reality is that Éxito Colombia has ventured into other business opportunities over the years and has successfully launched various projects. The first one that can be highlighted is the Fundación Éxito, created in 1993 with the aim of providing aid to improve social and educational conditions for children, as well as supporting efforts to work towards child nutrition. This goes hand in hand with an initiative presented in 2014 which aims to achieve that no child under 5 years of age in Colombia suffers from chronic malnutrition by 2030.
In 1998, the company recognized the need to enter the digital world, so it partnered with NormaNet to create its website and thus have an online sales system. The website initially only had toys, but gradually other products were added until the end of 1999, when manufactured products were also included. Éxito was a pioneer in e-commerce in Colombia.
In 2005, they decided to create the Éxito Digital Card, which allowed their customers to make purchases online from their cellphones. Today, this card allows its holder to make purchases in Colombia, internationally, and withdraw cash at Éxito store cash registers.
Over the years, the company absorbed and merged with other businesses, which helped with its expansion and internationalization, but these actions were mostly directed by the Éxito Group as a whole rather than the supermarket stores. However, in 2010 they decided to launch a new format called Éxito Express, which consists of offering a mini-market, that is, opening smaller stores for simpler purchases by the customer; this goes hand in hand with the opening of Éxito Wow in 2018, another format of the supermarket chain but that seeks to combine the physical and virtual world.
On the other hand, the chain of stores also has Móvil Éxito, created in 2013, with which users can access a 4G LTE technology phone service. This is a type of MVNO telephony, which means that Éxito does not have its own network to offer its mobile phone and Internet services and does so through another company, which in this case is Tigo.
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