On the 22nd, Lotte Mart announced that sales and the number of visitors to its Hanoi Center store increased by 15% and 10%, respectively, over the past year. The results reflect the success achieved since the store was remodeled as a grocery specialty store in July of last year.
Lotte Mart is the only domestic retailer that has chosen to enter Vietnam directly rather than through franchising. It is implementing a localization strategy that combines the Korean retail system with Vietnamese consumer trends. The Hanoi Center store offers over 450 varieties of menu items, including more than 70 Korean dishes such as tteokbokki, gimbap, and dakgangjeong in its ready-to-eat food space called "Cooking Kitchen."
Since the introduction of this space, sales of ready-to-eat foods have increased by more than 35% compared to the same period last year. The share of K-food in total ready-to-eat food sales reaches 40%, with over 100,000 gimbap and more than 50,000 servings of tteokbokki sold in the past year, Lotte Mart reported.
In addition, reflecting the trend of Vietnamese consumers increasingly seeking premium products, Lotte Mart has caught attention by introducing chamoe (Korean melon) this year, following strawberries and Shine Muscat grapes.
Lotte Mart will renovate its Nha Trang store, located in the tourist city of Nha Trang in central-south Vietnam, into a grocery specialty store by the end of this year. The Gold Coast store, located on the beach in Nha Trang, will operate as a tourist-oriented store, implementing a dual strategy that fits the characteristics of the commercial area.
Shin Joo-baek, head of Lotte Mart Vietnam, noted, "Lotte Mart is continuously growing by integrating the localization strategy into the grocery specialty store model that succeeded in Korea, achieving meaningful results. We will continue to strengthen our influence and competitiveness in the Vietnamese market based on differentiated content such as K-food and K-beauty."