Laurent BONNET

Could you introduce your company?

The Fnac / Darty Group is one of the leaders in omnichannel retail in Europe with a multitude of brands such as: Nature & Découvertes, WeFix, France Billets and BilletRéduc for the most well-known. The Group includes around 1,000 shops mainly located in Europe but also in the Middle East and West Africa, with a turnover of almost 8 billion euros in 2022. Half of the Group’s stores are operated in branches and the other half as franchises.  
Every year, we continue to expand in smaller cities in order to densify our territorial coverage and support our omnichannel strategy which consists of being less than 15/20 minutes away from each customer. This omnichannel approach to the customer experience is our strength and enables us to be very competitive compared with other players in the market, who are exclusively online.  

What is the Group’s main focus in its market? 

We are deploying our strategic plan called “Everyday” with 3 major axes: 

• To make the FNAC / DARTY Group the benchmark in the omnichannel, digital and human retail market – that is to say, a digitalised commerce to keep pace with changing consumer habits, but also a humanised commerce. 

• To become a value-added services company for our customers, both online and offline, by reinforcing our position around the home. 
• To accompany consumers in adopting sustainable practices by bringing a strong CSR dimension around second-hand products and repair, in order to support their buying power. That way, we want our customers to have a choice between a new product, a second-hand product or a repair. We already are France’s leading repairer with more than 2 million of products per year. We would like to accelerate our growth in this market. To do so, we provide our customers with information on the products that consume the least energy, are easiest to repair and have the lowest carbon footprint. 

Why does a Group like yours need real estate data? 

We use several sector-specific reference tools to enable us to analyse our penetration rate, calculate our turnover, measure our cannibalization… Codata is the leading real estate database on the market. It is, therefore, one of our tools and is complementary to the others. It gives us precise access to the quality of a site, to a description of the environment of a future site… 

How do you use Codata Explorer?

We use Codata daily to prepare, to analyse and to verify our real estate projects. Our first reflex, when we detect an opportunity on a particular site, is to consult the Codata database. It enables us to get a general idea of the environment, the location, the retailers located in the vicinity… and it enables us to confirm the potential of a project. Codata gives a good overview of what is happening in a market, in a city, in an urban area, by providing very detailed and comprehensive data as well as figures, economic statistics and socio-demographic statistics. Once crosschecked with our own data, Codata’s data enables us to greenlight a project or not.    
Finally, Codata also enables us to build our real estate strategy by helping us to determine which sites we want to target in France. The tool enables to identify, in a particular city without even having visited it, if there is a potential site to study. Then, we go and visit it. 

According to you, what are the strengths of the Codata solution? 

The benefits of Codata are its online accessibility, the simplicity of its ergonomics but above all a level of precision, clarity and updating that enables us to be provided with ultra-reliable data. There is no equivalent on the market today!