Carrefour Buy 127 Shopping Malls

 Carrefour, the French retailing giant, said Monday that it was joining a group of investors in a 2 billion euro plan to purchase more than a hundred shopping malls in France, Spain and Italy in an attempt to restore profitability to its underperforming European operations.

The deal comes as a new management team at Carrefour, the world’s second-largest retailer by sales, after Walmart, seeks to refocus on its core markets in Europe following years of rapid international expansion that has yielded uneven results.

Carrefour said it would purchase 127 shopping malls in which it already operate stores from a French real estate group, Klépierre. The plan is to combine those with 45 malls Carrefour already owns to create a new, separate property company in which Carrefour would hold a 42 percent stake. Institutional investors that Carrefour did not identify would hold the rest.