CU Opens 300th Store in Mongolia... Achieves 70% Market Share

Last Year, Mongolia CU Store Sales Increased by 48%

On the 7th, at the opening ceremony of the 300th CU store in Mongolia, Jang Young-cheol, Head of Product and Overseas Business Division at BGF Retail (right), and Ganbold Chinjerik, CEO of Central Express, are taking a commemorative photo.
[Photo by BGF Retail]

CU announced on the 9th that it has opened its 300th store in Mongolia, leading the way in pioneering overseas markets. This is the first time a domestic distribution company has opened 300 stores in a single country.

According to CU, the opening ceremony of the 300th CU store in Mongolia on the 7th was attended by Adilbish, chairman of Premium Group, a Mongolian partner company, Ganbold Chinjerik, CEO of Central Express (CE), and BGF Retail officials, who reviewed the status of local stores and shared future business strategies.

The 300th store in Mongolia is the CU Gerulkuvista branch located within a luxury apartment complex in the southern central area of Ulaanbaatar, the capital city. Catering to the location characteristics where many young customers familiar with Korean culture reside, differentiated products such as various Korean convenience store desserts, instant meals, and private brand (PB) items are being operated about 40% more extensively compared to other stores.

CU is further expanding its presence across the region by opening three stores in Darkhan, Mongolia’s second-largest city. It took about 26 months to open 100 stores since CU first entered Mongolia in 2018, about 18 months to reach 200 stores, and approximately 10 months to open the 300th store, showing an accelerating pace of store openings. Currently, CU holds a dominant 70% market share in the Mongolian convenience store market. Last year, sales at Mongolian CU stores increased by 48% compared to the previous year. Sales of instant cooked foods such as tteokbokki, fried snacks, hotteok, and instant ramen rose by 117.4%, and Get Coffee recorded a sales growth rate of 120.2%.

A BGF Retail official said, “We are pleased that our efforts to deliver CU’s unique value in the global market have been recognized with the opening of the 300th store in Mongolia,” adding, “We will continue to spread Korean convenience store culture and add social value, leading the Korean Wave of convenience stores as Korea’s number one convenience store franchise.”