Carrefour And Bourgas Plaza Shopping Mall To Open 10 Days Apart In Bourgas

The first hypermarket of French group Carrefour will officially open for business this week in Bourgas, Bulgaria's second largest Black Sea city.This event will mark an important phase in the development of trade and retail in the region, because this is the first such shopping centre built outside of Sofia. It is also located in the first mall in Bourgas, the Bourgas Plaza shopping centre.The Bourgas Plaza mall, which will have a wide array of boutiques, luxury stores, fashion shops, stores for accessories, restaurants, fast food outlets and cafes, will open in the first week of April, 10 days after Carrefour.Located on Transportna St., which links the motorway from Sofia at the junction with the road leading to Slnchev Briag (Sunny Beach) and Varna, the site has gradually developed as a major business and retail complex which features other prominent companies such as Metro and Technommarket as well as dozens of office buildings.Bourgaz Plaza is on a 52 ha parcel of land with a total of 39 000 sq m of retail space, consisting of more than 90 stores of which the Carrefour hypermarket is the largest.Apart from Carrefour, other establishments will also mark their debut in the country - or at least in the region - notably the German cosmetics company Douglas and the shoe chain Deichmann as well as McDonalds, KFC and Fancy.The main investor in the project is British businessman Richard McDonald, Tania Koseva Boshova Bridgecorp, and Gort Holding of Henry Jones, the owner of the Radisson SAS hotel in Sofia.The main consulting firm is Colliers International.Carrefour has entered the market relatively late in comparison to other such brands, like Billa, Metro and Kaufland. However, experts in the field believe that the company has a strong potential to accumulate momentum as they expand with the opening of four new stores in malls in Sofia, Varna and Stara Zagora.