Market Structure Of The Uk Supermarket Sector

Product offerings by these contenders are similar as Tesco’s to a huge degree. This procedure helps Tesco to ensure its commercial center by expanding competition. A large portion of the contenders of the Tesco have an equivalent or a bigger market share in the store business. By industry investigators, Tesco PLC has a twenty nine per cent of shares the grocery store industry.

In the United States, the food retail industry is absolutely massive. According to Statista, this industry brings in nearly 5.27 trillion dollars annually and 594.4 billion of that is from grocery store sales. In this market, the 20-ton gorilla in the room is Walmart, racking in nearly 20% of the entire market at around 118 billion dollars in 2013 according to the Harvard Business School case study. Following Walmart, Kroger and Costco own the biggest next largest slices bringing in 76 billion and 71 billion respectively. In this highly competitive market that has some of the smallest margins of any industry it can be tough to get ahead and even tougher to grow. However, Trader Joe’s has managed to pierce what was once a very small world

Trader Joe's faces several threats to its business, as competitors try to invade the company’s niche and attempt to imitate the company’s core strategies. The supermarket industry itself faces a major threat, as larger chains such as grocery retailers Wal-Mart and Tesco have begun to open small-format stores that mimic the Trader Joe's approach. This invasion results in additional cost pressure for incumbents like Trader Joe’s, which had to let go employees in order to become more cost competitive.

Businesses are not only faced with competition within the industry they operate in. They also face competition from businesses in other industries.

The UK supermarket industry is a very competitive and profitable industry. It is made up of four main players with significant share of the market, and then various smaller companies who focus on smaller niches in the market such as the bottom of the market discounters and the top of the line speciality stores. It is an interesting market and this report evaluates the attractiveness of the industry using Porter’s five forces model with an insight into how market nicher Waitrose sustains a competitive advantage. Next this report looks at how major player Sainsbury’s successfully competes against its rivals using differentiation strategies, and analyses current consumer trends and problems can effect this industry.

Markets differ in a variety of ways including the degree of concentration and competitiveness, a fact which is reflected in the concept of ‘market structure’. Economists’ models link the structural characteristics of a market to the behaviour of firms in that market and subsequently to their performance. A key question therefore is how far a firm’s strategic decisions are shaped by the structure of the market in which it operates.

In the field of microeconomics, the market structure of an organization determines the performance of the organization within the industry. There are different types of market structures practiced today. Among these market structures include the perfect competition structure (Miller, Vandome, & McBrewster, 2009). In perfect competition structure, the competition happens between numerous small firms against each other. In this practice, there is optimum production by the firms socially at the minimum cost per unit possible. There is no barrier to entry in this structure, hence new companies and organizations can join easily. The

The organization and characteristics of a specific market where a company operates is referred to as market structure. While markets can basically be classified by their degree of competitiveness and pricing, there are four types of markets i.e. perfect competition, monopolistic competition, monopoly, and oligopoly. In perfect competition markets, many firms are price takers whereas monopolistic competition markets are characterized by the ability of some firms to have market power. In contrast, oligopoly markets are those in which few firms can be price makers while monopoly market is where one firm can be a price maker.

The competition to a chain retail grocery store, such as Kroger, is not limited to other

The Australian Supermarket Industry is the very hot topic that’s why very interesting topic now days. The Australian supermarket and grocery stores have a very severe competition in Australia mainly because of organizations competing in this mature industry are going towards cost reduction initiatives with competing advantage rather than product differentiation strategies, In other words business in this industry increase market share by charging lower prices while making reasonably fair profit. The growing popularity of ALDI – German based company of introducing its own label goods (products manufactured and sold under the retailers own brand) with low cost has forced the two giants –Woolworths and Coles to cut price

The UK supermarket industry resembles an oligopolistic industry, with several characteristics. Oligopolistic markets tend to be characterised by high concentration ratios, barriers to entry and…Since the turn of the century, the industry has been scrutinised by both the Office of Fair Trading and has been referred to the Competition Commission on two occasions. (Seely, 2012)

•Monopolistic competition- When an industry contains many rival firms, each of which has a comparable but at least slightly different product. Restaurants, are an example, all serve food but of different types of food and in different sites. Manufacture costs are above what could be attained if firms sold equal products, but consumers have an advantage from the variety.

There are 92,796 grocery stores in the UK and the market value increase by 19.5% in the last 5 years and according to IGD forecast the UK grocery market should reach £203bn by 2019. But what we can see in the figure 1 that from 2009 to 2014 annual grow in the grocery market start decreasing from 4.9% in 2009 to 2.8% in 2014. One of the reason for this is difficult economic conditions which had an effect for consumer spending. Consumers choose to spend less money on food by buying less food or by looking for cheaper places. Retail market is diversified into three main sectors: Hypermarket and superstores which accounts for 42.3% of retail market, convenience stores 21.4% and small supermarkets 20.3% (Figure 3). So about 84% of sales are done in these three sectors. The biggest 4 retail chains in UK are: Tesco which takes 28.7% market share, Asda has 17.3%, Sainsbury’s 16.6% and Morrison’s 11%. (Figure 2) So, if we will sum up 4 biggest retail market chains we will have about ¾ of market share. Finally, a strong characteristic of this sector is competition with price wars and a

The supermarket wars has been increasingly frustrating for consumers as sometimes consumers tend not to know where to get the best deals, as they all advertise the same price and brands, in the UK companies such as Tesco and Asda advertise and sell the same products but also claim to low on prices for the customer satisfaction, but in fact they charge more when it comes to their own brands, looking in the telecommunication sector is clear that with the privatization of the telecommunications industry, the mobile phone industry experiences transformations that enhance the dynamics of competition.

One step away from perfect competition is monopolistic competition. This type of market structure has a number of different characteristics from the above. Which turn it into one of the most used market structures. In this scenario, companies are not all price takers and start making use of economies of scale in order to improve efficiency, reduce costs and increase profits. In the scenario companies sell a differentiated product at different prices. Like in perfect competition no barriers are put to entry and newcomers a constant threat to the market keeping every player always in search for a better mean to produce and compete.