by ZHAO Xiaojuan

Metro China's latest management reshuffle is less about expansion — and more about finally resolving a long-standing question: what kind of retailer it wants to be.

On April 27, the company appointed Andrew Miles, former president of Sam's Club China, as executive chairman of Metro China. XU Shaochuan was named chief executive officer, while Tino Zeiske will serve as advisor. The move comes just two months after Miles joined as an advisor, marking a swift elevation to the center of Metro's decision-making.

The speed of that transition signals urgency. But Metro's challenge runs deeper than management structure.

The problem is not format. It is consistency.

For years, Metro has oscillated between identities. It built its China business on a strict business-to-business (B2B) membership model, serving restaurants, hotels and small retailers. Yet it has repeatedly tried to pivot toward individual consumers, experimenting with hybrid pricing, free membership and, more recently, paid consumer memberships.

These shifts have not added up to a coherent strategy. Instead, they point to a company still searching for a stable operating logic.

That is where Miles is expected to make a difference — not by replicating Sam's Club, but by addressing the capabilities Metro has struggled to build.

At Sam's, Miles spent more than a decade working on merchandising, supply chain efficiency and membership operations. During that period, the chain expanded rapidly in China, scaling from fewer than 10 stores to more than 50 while strengthening customer retention and operational discipline.

But the value of that experience lies beneath the surface.

Sam's Club is often defined by its visible features — paid memberships, bulk packaging and a limited assortment of high-turnover products. In reality, its competitive edge comes from execution: tight product curation, efficient supply chain coordination and a highly disciplined membership model.

These are precisely the areas where Metro has lacked continuity.

Metro's past attempts to import external expertise suggest the issue is not simply one of leadership. In 2020, the company brought in former Walmart executive CHEN Zhiyu as deputy CEO, aiming to replicate elements of the Sam's model. Four years later, he had departed, and the model failed to take root.

The lesson is clear. The challenge is not copying a format — it is defining a direction.

Unlike Sam's, which targets middle- to high-income households with a focused value proposition, Metro operates with a more complex legacy. It retains a large B2B wholesale business while trying to expand into consumer retail, creating a structural tension that no single format can easily resolve.

This complexity is also reflected in its store network. With nearly 100 locations across China and backing from Wumart Group, which took control in 2020, Metro has scale and local resources. But scale alone does not translate into clarity.

Fully converting its network into large-format membership stores, as Sam's has done, would be neither practical nor necessarily effective. The greater challenge is how to reorganize existing assets — B2B relationships, supply chain infrastructure and store footprint — into a model that can be sustained over time.

Recent moves underscore the difficulty. Some stores have reopened to non-members, adopting dual pricing systems that echo earlier experiments. Rather than signaling a clear shift, these adjustments suggest Metro is still recalibrating its approach.

Miles' role, then, is not to turn Metro into Sam's Club. It is to extract what can be replicated — particularly in supply chain discipline, private-label development and membership value design — while working within Metro's more complex starting point.

That is a more demanding task than it may appear.

For more than two decades, Metro has adjusted its format without settling its identity. The latest reshuffle may bring new momentum, but it does not, on its own, resolve that underlying question.

And until it does, Metro's strategy risks continuing to shift — even as the market around it becomes more defined.