Appearing as a survivor after the liquidations of Gorillas and Getir which left 1,300 employees in the lurch, the specialist in express home delivery of groceries Flink France has just been taken over, allowing 270 employees to keep their jobs, while around 200 positions will be eliminated. “We, the employees, are worried because we do not know who will stay in the company and who will not,” Sorike Kamassokho, representative of the employees and the CGT union section, told AFP. The trade unionist believes that Flink’s “thirty undocumented workers” are the “big losers” in this issue.
In receivership since June, Flink France is taken over by Guillaume Luscan, the current general manager, the German parent company and the Algerian start-up Yassir, with 56% of the workforce maintained, management announced this Tuesday, September 12, offer having been accepted by the Paris commercial court. The activity will continue under the Flink brand, in particular thanks to an investment of more than 5 million euros from Yassir. This start-up is “specialized in on-demand and payment services, one of the most valuable in the Europe, Middle East and Africa zone,” Guillaume Luscan explained on Friday.
The financing requirement necessary for the project for the company to reach its profitability threshold is of the order of 5.4 million euros, including the acquisition price of Flink France of approximately 500,000 euros, according to the offer that AFP consulted. The buyers wish to refocus the activity “on the most operational sites”, “massify volumes” and significantly reduce fixed costs.
They thus retain 14 of the 19 sites which allow this express home delivery of groceries, in the cities of Paris, Lyon, Lille, Marseille, Montpellier, Nice, Bordeaux, Toulouse and Nantes, choosing to close “as a priority” those targeted by the remonstrances from local residents and elected officials due to the incessant comings and goings of delivery men, according to Mr. Luscan. That is to say four stores in Paris and one in the Paris region.
“Be compliant”
Last March, very restrictive regulations brought a blow to the surviving players specializing in “quick commerce”. The government had decreed that “dark stores” – these premises where the products to be delivered are stored – were warehouses and not businesses, opening the way to regulation by town halls of this activity, and even to the closure of certain sites. . The Turkish company Getir, which operated the Getir, Frichti and Gorillas brands, then announced that it was withdrawing from the French market. Getir and Gorillas have been liquidated, the fate of Frichti will be decided at the end of September.
Flink France had been placed in receivership, for “essentially regulatory” reasons, Guillaume Luscan told AFP in June. With this resumption, “we want to develop an activity that fits best into its environment”, particularly regulatory, he underlined on Friday. “Among the 14 (sites which will be preserved), not all are yet in storage but we have an action plan with different options to comply,” highlighted the man who is also the co-founder of Cajoo (today now absorbed by Flink SE) and who has managed Flink France since March 2023. “I believe enormously in the express delivery model, because our customers love our service, we see it in the customer satisfaction figures,” said he still rejoiced. “We have a recovery and restructuring plan that allows us to achieve profitability, focusing on improving the customer experience through the expansion of the offering and the addition of new functionalities. the application,” he explained.
Established in France for two years, Flink was created in 2020 in Germany by logistics and distribution experts.