specialty stores, amounting to a network of 3852 sales locations and 75 malls in Thailand, Vietnam and Italy (it owns the Rinascente department-store chain).  Also, the portfolio still has a lot more growth potential. This year, Central plans to open four new home-improvement stores, 10 supermarkets/food halls and four Go Wholesale warehouses in Thailand, plus two Go! hypermarkets and three Mini Go! stores in Vietnam. Fourth-quarter and full-year results Total company revenue surged by 5.1 per cent, year on year, in the fourth quarter, to reach 69.3 billion Thai baht. The retail sales mix is nicely balanced, with 30 per cent hardlines, 39 per cent food and 31 per cent fashion. However, fashion is the high-margin business, contributing 51 per cent of earnings. Omnichannel grew by another 10 per cent, year over year in the fourth quarter and now accounts for 20 per cent of company sales. Its contribution is much higher in Thailand (25 per cent) than in Vietnam (11 per cent). For the full year, revenue grew by 5.7 per cent, to 262.8 billion baht, and net profit by 1.3 per cent to 8.6 billion baht.  The company has a lot to crow about this year, and crow it did. Among the highlights was a successful relaunch of Central Chidlom (popularly known as Central Department Store) in downtown Bangkok, with a new multi-level designer wing called Luxe Galerie. Not content with just giving the store a new look and elevated market position, Central even rechristened it, somewhat Inauthentically, as ‘Store of Bangkok’. Another aspect of performance that pleased the company was its home-improvement arm, Thai Watsadu, which is enjoying higher margins, strong profit growth and is in all likelihood taking market share from its rivals in a highly competitive retail sector. Both Home Pro and Siam Global House are, like Thai Watsadu, national operators of gigantic home-improvement warehouses, and neither would be particularly pleased by the news coming out of Central’s accounting department. A third aspect of Central’s progress over the past year is the expansion of its new Go Wholesale chain to 10 units, readying it to compete with the sector giant, CP Axtra’s Makro. Fourth, the company is pleased with the progress it is making with its lifestyle mall format that is infilling pockets of growth in secondary markets that are not quite big enough to be served by a full-sized super-regional mall operated by sister company Central Pattana. The lifestyle malls are typically only two levels, compared with Central Pattana’s five-level model, and the department-store component (Robinsons) is smaller than the full-sized Central Department Store that co-anchors the Central Pattana model. Fifth, the company believes it is now dominating the premium supermarket business in Thailand with its Tops banner, with stiff competition coming from Lotus’s in the Greater Bangkok area. Is there a problem? The answer, unfortunately, is yes, but it tends to be weighted somewhat toward Vietnam. Central’s improved sales results are being driven mostly by new store openings and omnichannel, while the existing physical stores are not generating growth, at least not evenly across the portfolio. The detail: While top-line sales in the food segment rose by 12 per cent in the fourth quarter, same-store sales were down by 2 per cent. Hardline sales were down by 2 per cent and same-store sales in that segment fell by 5 per cent. Fashion was marginally better, with the top line growing by 7 per cent and same-store sales by 1 per cent.  These numbers are not blips either, it’s been like this all year. Vietnam has been a disproportionate culprit. Hardlines are still very much a work in progress and progress is slow: same-store sales in that segment in Vietnam were down by a whopping 19 per cent in 2024, thanks to the poor performance of the 47-strong NK appliance chain, which Central has been trying to turn around since it acquired 100 per cent of the business in 2019 – so far without much success. Ready, set, go! The company’s ambition is to be the top retail conglomerate in Southeast Asia and its expansion program is ambitious. Of particular interest is the Go Wholesale expansion, which is going up against Makro, the incumbent powerhouse of the sector in Thailand. It now has 10 units in operation and by the end of 2025 will have 14 if all goes according to plan. It is laying down beachheads nationwide, from Chiang Mai in the north all the way down to Phuket in the south. Central is serious about this and its competitive battle with Makro promises to become one of the highlights of the region’s retail scene. Meanwhile, its namesake in Vietnam, Go!, is also to be expanded by Central – into the Vietnam heartland – and there will be 44 malls in operation by the end of this year, many of them anchored by Go! hypermarkets. (Go! in Vietnam is the reincarnation of Big C, which in Vietnam is operated by Central but in its home country of Thailand is a unit of Berli Jucker.)  Economic outlook is mixed The pace of growth across the three countries in which Central operates will vary considerably in 2025 if the forecasts hold up. While Vietnam’s economy is expected to be one of the stars of Southeast Asia with GDP growth nearing 7 per cent, Thailand’s will be a more modest 2.9 per cent and Italy’s is just crawling along at +0.7 per cent. Everywhere you look where economics is being discussed, the effect of tariffs and weak commodity prices is taking centre stage. No one really knows in this kind of environment what will happen, although that isn’t to say that anyone knew even in ‘normal’ times. Further reading: Eat, shop, play, repeat: Behind Central Retail’s winning mall formula