Cătălin Samara, the operational and e-commerce director of Carrefour Romania and a member of the retailer’s executive committee, has been appointed director of Bringo Internațional. 

He will coordinate the Bringo activity in the five markets where the delivery service is available under various brands: Romania, Argentina, Belgium, France, and Morocco, the company said. 

He takes over a newly-established position, which follows the development of Bringo, “a local business concept successfully exported to four other countries, which will now function as part of a global organization,” the company said. Samara played an essential role in developing the service, supervising the e-commerce activities of Carrefour Romania and the expansion plan of the partnership with Bringo.

He has been working with Carrefour Romania for 21 years, having joined in 2000 as one of the first employees, months before the opening of the retailer’s first store in the country. So far, he has held positions such as Operational Director Hypermarkets, Marketing, Digital and E-commerce director, and has been a member of the company’s executive committee since 2011. As Operational & E-commerce director, he is in charge of the operations of all the brick-and-mortar store formats in the Carrefour Romania network (hypermarkets, supermarkets, proximity stores and Supeco). He also coordinated the development of the omnichannel business model, which included the e-commerce strategy and the digital transformation operations.

Bringo was launched in 2016 by Beta Software Management and Ascend Netsolutions. The latter also created the Star Taxi app for taxi orders and Oliviera, for online orders from various restaurants in Bucharest, taken over by Takeaway.com. Carrefour constantly increased the share it held in the platform and last year became its sole owner. 

In four years, Bringo expanded to 37 cities in Romania and currently includes in the app more than 100 Carrefour stores of all formats. It also launched a 30-minute, fast delivery service, available in Bucharest, Iași, Cluj, Timișoara, Constanța and Brașov. 

(Photo courtesy of the company)

simona@romania-insider.com