McKinsey: How is lack of scale in transversal technologies risking Europe’s position in retail?
Clarisse Magnin:Europe actually has some of the world’s highest performing retailers, yet it lacks a retail platform that matches the scale of US and Chinese online retailers. European retail is actually one of the top three sectors where we observed an improvement in performance between 2000 and 2019.
If we compare European retail with the US, we are actually stronger on profitability and investment, but are lagging behind in growth and R&D. Therefore, from a technology standpoint, we see quite a lot of unlocks in better understanding the customer journeys and extracting the full value from analyzing those journeys across all touchpoints.
We also see quite a lot of retailers investing a lot of money in their legacy systems. So they’re busy keeping their existing systems running, as opposed to investing in new technology and new tech foundations they will need to create more growth in the future.