giant Siam Makro cash-and-carry chain, and the little matter of about 12,000 7-Eleven convenience stores. Meanwhile, many expats living in the region were grumpy about the prospect of some familiar UK products disappearing from the shelves along with Tesco as it vanished from Southeast Asia. Some of the grumpiness was tempered with amusement though, as CP announced it was rebranding Tesco-Lotus as Lotus’s, with the trailing ‘s’ standing for ‘smart’. It doesn’t roll easily off the tongue of a native English speaker, though many Thais and Malaysians were delighted. Thais, for example, pronounce the word ‘Lowtut-S’ and are happy to see a symbol of foreign retail imperialism erased from their retail landscape. Now, the rebrand is well under way and markers of the transformation can be seen both outside and inside the stores, many of them positive. By the end of this year, the company expects all of its stores to have been repainted and renamed, with the old red and green Tesco-Lotus signage replaced by the breezy pastel green and yellow Lotus’s. As of the end of 2021, Lotus’s had 2,618 stores in Thailand and 62 in Malaysia, divided among freestanding hypermarkets, supermarkets, mini-supermarkets, and hypermarket-anchored malls. The mall space is material, more than 1,000,000sqm of it, of which about 30 per cent is in Malaysia. Tenants pay Lotus’s a handsome amount of rental income – more than $70 million from October 25 to December 31 last year. But is the rebrand much more than just a cosmetic change of logo and a coat of fresh paint? With CP Group’s strengths being in food and agribusiness, customers should have expected the quality of the grocery offering to go up noticeably, with a particular improvement in the fresh food department. Has that happened? To see the transformation for ourselves, we visited a number of Lotus’s hypermarkets and malls in recent weeks, and were generally pleased with the way they have been fine-tuned under the new ownership regime, although it’s a mixed bag and there is still work to do.  It isn’t just the city stores that are important One of the indicators of a retailer’s intentions is how much it invests in its regional stores, which typically have less competition than in urban areas. It is one thing to pamper the flagships and other stores in high-density locations, but quite another to take responsibility for offering the best possible service to residents of regional areas. To assess how Lotus’s measures up in this regard, we visited several regional stores, including one in the northeastern Thai city of Yasothon. In densely populated urban areas, Lotus’s malls – like those of its main competitor Big C – are on two levels, with the ground-floor space rented out to specialty retailers and the hypermarket upstairs on the second level. However, where land is less expensive, as in provincial cities and towns, the malls often have just one level. Lotus’s at Yasothon is an example. Here, we found a good illustration of how spruced up and well-located Lotus’s hypermarkets are outcompeting their biggest rivals in many instances. The Yasothon mall occupies one corner of the main intersection of two highways connecting Yasothon with neighbouring cities. The specialty store space is exhaustively leased, with seemingly not a single square metre of floor space being left unattended. What wasn’t leased to long-term tenants was occupied by pop-ups. There was also a flea market in the parking lot and there were temporary tenants around the building perimeter. Entrance to the hypermarket is refreshingly open on both the supermarket side and the general merchandise side. Instead of being channeled straight into the supermarket fresh food area, the shopper has the option of entering from the other side of the storefront and traversing the home goods department. Placing fresh produce at the single entrance to a supermarket in as attractive a display as possible is an old rule of thumb for the grocery business. Fresh fruit, vegetables, flowers and baked goods smell good, look good, can be showcased pleasingly, and make an initial wow impact on the shopper that can result in good outcomes. At Asian hypermarkets, this rule is not always honoured. Overall, this Lotus’s store was well presented, well lit, had a huge range of merchandise across most categories, and was brimming with service personnel who kept a discreet distance until called upon. On the supermarket side of the store, the fresh food looked a lot better than we were accustomed to seeing at regional and even urban hypermarkets back in the Tesco Lotus day, but seemed to be compressed into an unusually small space and suffered from limited range. There also appeared to be only very limited space for refrigerated food and some categories were excluded completely. However, the space allocated to dry goods was bountiful and the shelves were well stocked and attractive. There was also almost a complete absence of European-style cooking ingredients, which is to be expected in a regional city. Out in the mall itself, the small tenants were arranged in a racetrack configuration and the variety of services and merchandise was impressive: banks, telecoms, restaurants, a pharmacy, a small food court, a cinema, and, of course, two gold jewelry shops. Taking into account the allocation of space among categories in both the hypermarket and the mall, this was a true neighbourhood shopping centre but with the trade area draw of a much larger beast. Down the road at the Big C, things weren’t so buzzy. The building looked as though it hadn’t enjoyed renovation for some time. It wasn’t so well lit and looked slightly dingy, so it wasn’t surprising that the parking lot was not as full and there was considerably less foot traffic here than at Lotus’s. The Lotus’s hypermarket concept is clearly a work in progress but appears to be headed in the right direction despite the fact that Tesco’s withdrawal has taken with it many of the private-label goods that constituted a major differentiator for its stores. Moreover, the corporate partnership with the Siam Makro business is, surprisingly, not yet as impactful on the merchandising as one might expect. All in all, the advantage of a stronger supply chain because of CP Group’s core business in food and agribusiness is visible but not particularly salient. Clearly, the transformation of Tesco-Lotus to Lotus’s needs time. And it seems to have gotten lucky, because a lack of investment by its main competitors during two years of Covid-19 has afforded it more time than it might otherwise have received.