MAPIC: Top 10 takeaways

The strong growth of ecommerce is the biggest change in the retail market in the past 12 months, according to James Brown, head of EMEA retail research and consulting at Jones Lang LaSalle.

'We must not underestimate the impact of the digital revolution,' Brown said during a wrap-up session on the final day of the Mapic retail fair in Cannes. 'We need to come to terms with the way it will change the retail space.'

Brown noted that different markets are at different stages of evolution. In the UK - the most developed market in Europe - forecasts point to 25% of sales being digital by 2020, he added: 'Other countries will follow in due course.'

In all, Brown had 10 key takeaways from Mapic 2012:

• Uncertainty will remain in the market and retail sales will remain subdued. This will continue for some time
• Pockets of strong growth exist across Europe, particularly Turkey and Russia, but also across some of the core countries in Western Europe including the UK and Germany
• International retailer expansion will continue across Europe and beyond but it will become more targeted
• Retailers need to adapt their business models to the rapidly evolving multichannel world
• Retailer optimisation and consolidation will continue. There will be further failures in the retail market place and retailers pulling out of countries where they are not getting the returns they had expected
• Redevelopment is becoming the new development in Western Europe
• New developments are confined primarily to emerging countries like Turkey and Russia
• The retail investment model will remain focused on the best locations; the outlook for secondary remains as grim as it was last year.
• Lack of debt is fuelling the further evolution of a two-tier market, with a growing divergence between prime and secondary
• Internationalization of the retail industry is fuelling new partnerships and collaboration between equity investors and best-in-class retail specialists