Germany's Schwarz Gruppe, the owner of discount retailers Lidl and Kaufland, is aiming to reach over €100 billion in sales this year.
The discount operator added that it plans to keep on investing, in order to maintain the growth trajectory it has seen in recent years.
Lidl and rival discount supermarket chain Aldi have been ploughing ahead with investment in other countries, especially in Britain, where they have been taking market share from the traditional players there.
Schwarz Gruppe said in a brief statement on Thursday that last year sales rose 7.4 percent to €96.9 billion, of which €74.6 billion came from Lidl, which has 10,460 stores in Europe and the United States.
The group invested €7 billion euros last year and said it was aiming for a similar amount this year.
Adventurous
Earlier this year, Schwarz Group CEO Klaus Gehrig said that he believed some of the discounter's latest ventures, including opening large, modern stores in the US, were perhaps a little bit too forward-thinking.
Many of the old Lidl virtues that have made us so successful must come more to the fore again," he told Germany's Manager Magazin at the start of the year, indicating dissatisfaction at the "glass shopping palaces" that are now part of the Lidl estate, which bear "no relation to the effort" involved in building them.
In the same interview, Gehrig also expressed dissatisfaction at former Lidl chief executive Sven Seidel, who implemented many of the new concepts seen in Lidl's European outlets, such as in-store bakeries and coffee machines.
News by Reuters, edited by ESM. Additional reporting by Stephen Wynne-Jones. Click subscribe to sign up to ESM: European Supermarket Magazine.
