In the financial district of Paris, hordes of sharply dressed workers rifle through wallpaper patterns, examine floor tiles and stock up on DIY kit. Surrounded by the gleaming, glass-fronted offices of La Défense, the French answer to Canary Wharf, and yards from the imposing, hollowed-out cube of La Grande Arche, it all seems a little incongruous: this is not the obvious location for a sister store to B&Q.

Philippe Tible concedes that it is a curious location, but as he strolls alongside bankers on their lunch breaks, Mr Tible, the chief executive of Kingfisher’s Castorama business (a rough equivalent to its B&Q chain in Britain) is explaining the differences, and similarities, in the markets on either side of the Channel. Shopping seems an incongruously un-French way to spend a lunch hour, but Mr Tible has no qualms about his customers embracing le modèle Anglo-Saxon. “[Home] ownership is lower in France, only 57 per cent, so it’s a big difference. But at the same time, it’s a great opportunity to develop that.”

An Englishman’s home may be his castle, but the French are also teaching Kingfisher a thing or two about DIY. Stores in B&Q are being designed to show-off complete “styles” for furnishing a room, rather than stocking each product separately, an innovation developed by Castorama, which has four themed “style houses” (la maison multicolore, la maison contemporaine etc) running through the stores.

The cross-pollination of ideas is one of the benefits of global groups, according to Ian Cheshire, the chief executive of Kingfisher, who has argued that retail is a rare international success story for British business. “We have taken a lot of French thinking into B&Q,” he says.

Kingfisher’s strategy rests on the belief that markets converge as they develop. “Everywhere in the world, people are aspiring to run their own homes and have similar sets of needs. [Home improvement] is emerging as a serious global market,” Mr Cheshire says. This convergence means that, as well as taking its offer overseas, Kingfisher and others in its position can harness their international scale by buying in bulk, driving down prices. The bad news for critics of globalisation — such as the French — is that this means more common product across its businesses. “Fashion,” Mr Cheshire says, “is increasingly globally driven.”

However, overeager expansion can be dangerous. This year Kingfisher said that it was scaling back substantially in China. By focusing on the potential size of the Chinese jackpot, Kingfisher took its eye off the prosaic business of shopkeeping. Retailers recall with horror Marks & Spencer’s failed foray into France and J Sainsbury’s retreat from Egypt and the United States.

But high-profile failures are not deterring everyone. Tesco is trying boldly to get its Fresh & Easy chain off the ground in the US. It turned overseas having nearly exhausted the opportunities on its home turf (it is the dominant supermarket in approximately 75 per cent of British postcodes) and international sales are now its primary source of growth.

Halfords and Mothercare, different but thoroughly British specialist retailers, offer models that attempt to combine the lure of the overseas gold rush with the prudence of the shopkeeper. Halfords, which has dipped its toes into Poland and the Czech Republic with a few stores, is led by David Wild, the man Wal-Mart sent to sort out its German business. “We took the view that we wouldn’t go into lots of overseas markets,” Mr Wild says. “We would pick a small number and go deep. The Czech Republic and Poland are the closest developing markets to the UK.”

At the other extreme, about 60 per cent of Mothercare’s 1,000 stores are located abroad, from Lagos to Shanghai. Opening these stores at a breakneck pace and running them from a Watford head office would be fraught with problems, so Mothercare uses a franchise system. This enables it to cash in on the world’s burgeoning middle classes without being cavalier.

When asked about the eventual geographic distribution of the group’s stores, Ben Gordon, the chief executive of Mothercare, recites what could serve as a rallying cry for all ambitious retailers: only 0.5 per cent of the world’s babies are born in Britain.

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