The Flink home shopping delivery platform will be liquidated in France

Flink is over, the express home shopping platform Flink, which employs 218 people in France, “will be liquidated” on Friday, its management announced on Thursday, which declared a cessation of payments before the Paris commercial court . The company, one of the last to operate in France in this sector, suffered from the inflationary context, “still strong regulatory pressure” and a “disinterest of investors” in the sector, declared the chairman and CEO. William Luscan. Placed in receivership last June, Flink France was taken over in September by Guillaume Luscan, then its general director, the German parent company and the Algerian start-up Yassir. The new entity was called New Flink France.

This takeover then made it possible to maintain 56% of the workforce, or more than 200 employees. The start-up Yassir, “specialized in on-demand and payment services, one of the most valuable in the Europe, Middle East and Africa zone”, according to Guillaume Luscan, had injected five million euros into the business. But inflation has weighed on product purchasing conditions and regulatory pressure, “which remains strong”, would require “significant” investments on the part of New Flink France to transform a certain number of its sites, explained its CEO.

Finally, the “financial context is very difficult”, investors “are losing interest in the sector” after the recent disappointments of “quick commerce”, or the express delivery of groceries to homes, he concluded. Indeed, in March 2023, very restrictive regulations put a stop to “quick commerce” players. The government had decreed that “dark stores”, these premises where the products to be delivered are stored, were warehouses and not businesses, opening the way to regulation by town halls of this activity, and even to the closure of certain sites. The Turkish company Getir, which operated the Getir, Frichti and Gorillas brands, then announced its withdrawal from the French market.

Getir and Gorillas had been liquidated, leaving 1,300 employees in the lurch, but Frichti had been taken over by a competitor, La Belle Vie. Flink, created in 2020 in Germany by logistics and distribution experts, established itself in France in 2021. Its turnover in France amounted to 37.5 million euros.