The $10B Turkish Aldi

This $10 billion Turkish supermarket chain started with 21 stores and a borrowed [clears throat] idea. Today, it operates over 12,000 locations across three [music] countries, and it got there by selling fewer products than almost any retailer on Earth. BIM launched in Istanbul in 1995. Its founders had spent time in Germany, studied the Aldi model up close, and came home with a radical conviction. Turkish consumers didn't need more choice. They needed [music] lower prices. At the time, grocery retail in Turkey was fragmented. Millions of small neighborhood stores called bakkals dominated the market. Modern retail chains barely existed, and inflation was making everyday essentials harder and harder to afford. [music] BIM saw that as an opportunity. They stripped the store down to around 800 core products with no fancy displays, no prime real estate, [music] and no advertising. Stores were planted on side streets in dense residential neighborhoods, close to where people actually lived, [music] cheap to rent and easy to replenish. The early years were hard. Convincing suppliers to accept high-volume, low-margin contracts wasn't easy, and persuading Turkish shoppers to trust a brand they'd never heard of, selling products with no recognizable label, took time. But, BIM kept building. Today, BIM holds 19% of Turkey's grocery market. Its private label products account for over 70% of everything it sells. It has expanded into Morocco and Egypt, and it has done almost all of it without taking on debt. [music] Comment BIM, and I'll send you the full episode on how a Turkish discount grocer built one of the most underrated business models in the world.