Marks & Spencer’s decision to close stores in 10 countries is the latest move in a chequered saga of international expansion and retrenchment dating to the 1970s.
1972 In its first foray abroad, M&S opens a store in Canada and soon after buys three local chains: Walker’s clothing stores, the women’s clothes retailer D’Allaird’s, and Peoples, a general goods retailer.
1975 M&S opens in France with branches in Paris and Lyon. It continues European expansion throughout the 70s including in France and Belgium.
1988 Under chairman Derek Rayner, M&S expands more aggressively. It opens two stores in Hong Kong and moves into the US with the purchase of the New Jersey-based Kings grocery chain and Brooks Brothers, the preppy men’s clothier, for almost $750m.
1992 M&S, by now run by Richard Greenbury, sells Peoples in Canada but continues foreign expansion.
1996 The company opens its first German store in Cologne. By this time M&S was adding countries rapidly through franchises in Denmark, Hungary, Malaysia, Turkey and other countries and ramping up its own operations in France and Spain. In Canada, D’Allaird’s is sold.
1997 South Korea is Greenbury’s next stop as M&S opens two stores in Seoul. M&S announces plans to spend more than £2bn on international expansion to make a quarter of revenues overseas by the early 21st century.
2001 New Belgian chief executive Luc Vandevelde announces a total withdrawal from mainland Europe to concentrate on rebuilding M&S’s ailing UK business. In the US, M&S sells loss-making Brooks Brothers for $225m – less than a third of the price it paid 15 years earlier.
2006 M&S cuts its final tie with the US by selling Kings after 18 years of ownership but Stuart Rose, who took over as chief executive in 2004, announces plans to open 150 mainly franchise stores overseas. Rose says M&S was wrong to pull out of Europe under Vandevelde.
2008 Rose takes control of M&S’s franchised operations in eastern Europe and announces plans to open more stores in the Czech Republic, Slovakia, Latvia and Lithuania. In November M&S opens its first store in China in Shanghai.
2009 Another chief executive, Marc Bolland, announces his goal to be an international retailer. With emerging markets in favour, India and China are high on his list.
2011 Bolland takes M&S back into Paris a decade after Vandevelde’s withdrawal by opening a flagship store on the Champs-Elysées.
2014 Bolland announces plans to open 250 stores around the world with further expansion in France, Spain and Italy.
2016 Steve Rowe, Bolland’s successor, abandons pretensions to be a global retailer, announcing he will close 53 overseas shops in 10 countries, including the Paris store.
