Carrefour: Bread, cheese, new boss? LAST summer, amid rumours that he was about to be sacked, Lars Olofsson was given another six months to revive Carrefour, the world's second-biggest retailer. His time is up. Carrefour's performance has grown mouldier since then - and not in a good way, like Roquefort cheese. In November 2011 it lost market share in France, its home market, which accounts for 42% of sales. This came after several profit warnings, a string of U-turns and a Brazilian merger plan that ended in failure. Carrefour's shares fell by 45% between January and December last year. Another profit warning may come on January 19th, when the firm will announce its quarterly results - and possibly Mr Olofsson's future. Carrefour's woes are not all the chief executive's fault. Mr Olofsson took over a struggling firm with a passé business model that mainly operates in a stagnant part of the world. However, he compounded these problems with inept management. A gifted marketer, he can make unrealistic goals sound reachable; but he cannot make them so. His plans for Carrefour have had to be revised more than once. Mr Olofsson is under pressure from Bernard Arnault, the boss of LVMH, a luxury-goods group, and Colony Capital, a property-investment firm. The two jointly own 16% of Carrefour's shares and 22% of the company's voting rights through Blue Capital, an investment vehicle. The stake they bought in 2007 has halved in value, so they are urging Mr Olofsson to pep up the stock price quickly. This makes it harder for him to devise a long-term strategy to turn around the sausage-laden supertanker. In the past, Carrefour had three strengths: low prices, a vast range of food, clothes and white goods, and the convenience of having all those things in one place. Today shoppers can find low prices and infinite choice online, so fewer bother to drive to an out-of-town hypermarket. European demography hurts Carrefour, too. Populations are ageing. More people live on their own. And whereas big families buy in bulk, singles tend to shop locally, frequently and in small quantities. "Hypermarkets are not dead, but they are outdated," says Natalie Berg at Planet Retail, a research firm. Mr Olofsson has invested hundreds of millions of euros in a revamp called "Carrefour planet." The new stores boast "beauty areas" with gleaming cosmetics counters and "organic areas" with mountains of organic food. Alas, building a "planet" shop costs twice as much as an ordinary hypermarket. And cash-strapped European shoppers want bargains, not overpriced vegetables. "This is not a good time to refit and renovate the stores," says Jérôme Samuel of HSBC, a bank. Carrefour depends too much on products that are in long-term decline, says John Kershaw at Bank of America Merrill Lynch. Its sales of white goods, books, DVDs and electrical gadgets shrank by 20% over the past four years. It needs to offer cheap food, which never goes out of fashion. But its hypermarkets are 8.8% more expensive that the cheapest rival, according to J.P.Morgan Cazenove. As the biggest retailer in France, Carrefour has the clout to cut prices by more and for longer than its rivals. But it hasn't done so. The next boss of Carrefour is likely to be French. Thierry Breton, a former economics minister, could be a candidate. Georges Plassat, a former boss of Casino, another supermarket chain, has indicated that he wants to stay in his current job as boss of Vivarte, a retail group. Noël Prioux, the head of Carrefour France, is another possibility, though he started his current job only in June. Carrefour has a good business in emerging markets and owns property worth an estimated €17 billion. Having decided to pull out of markets where it is not in the top two, it has a hefty market share in 32 countries. Yet Carrefour is still concentrated in Europe, especially France. Growth in Asia cannot make up for flops at home. Indeed, if the company does not perk up soon, investors may demand that its fizzy emerging-market business be spun off from its flat European one.