Woolworths

Rivalry: The rivalry in the retail industry is medium/high. Even though there are may retail companies in Australia with similar product offerings, only few belong to David Jones strategic group. On the other hand, the high fixed cost and industry overcapacity will eventually lead to the exit of the weakest market players.

According to Pettinger(2004) The Company extends its pillar of service not only by aiding clients in making decision to shop in stores, but also making it easy for them to drop by the stores and shop. There are two potential competitors existing in the market .There is Woolworths which has an 8% stake of the vast Australian market share and uses its subsidiaries such as Home Hardware and Timer, Thrifty Link, and Masters Home Improvement. There is also Metcash which has a 7.3% market share and uses its two subsidiaries: True Value Hardware and MITRE 10. Bunnings is currently the market leader in Australia (see Appendix figure1.1).Australia’s largest and most profitable home improvement retailer with (9,012,000) customers who shop at Bunnings over period of four week July 2014. This numbers was up in July 2012/13 which was 8,435,000. Bunnings potential competitors are Mitre 10 (1,789,000) and Masters (1,217,000).

Trader Joe’s is in the broad market of grocery retailers, a market where the top 10 revenue-generating companies accounted for over $360 billion in sales in 2011. This market is saturated with supermarkets (Publix and Kroger), large discount retailers (Wal-Mart and Target), premium retailers (Whole Foods and Fresh Market), warehouse clubs (Costco and Sam’s Club), and “hard discount” retailers (Dollar General). With this large variation in grocer strategies, the market is heavily penetrated and competition is fierce. Supermarkets are continually losing market share in grocery sales (51 percent in 2011 as opposed to 66 percent in 2001) as players like Wal-Mart and Costco continue to generate more revenue. Although the supermarket share is decreasing, the overall grocery market is steadily increasing as the population of the United States increases. People always need to eat, so there will always be a

1. The grocery industry is a commoditized industry, which makes it difficult for grocers to sustain through differentiation. Buyer power is high and thus, cost leadership and operational efficiencies are critical. There is fierce competition amongst various grocery stores, with the main players such as Loblaw and A&P holding multi-banner stores in various market segments. Traditional grocery stores also lose some of their market share to drug stores, convenience stores and other retailers who have entered the industry. Threat of substitutes from fast-food and take- away outlets is not as prevalent, since many grocery stores have started stocking ready-to-eat meals and have deli services available for consumers. Competitive

The threat of entry of the supermarket industry in US is low, which base on the analysis of the three major sources that related to the entry barriers. The first barrier is the economies of scale of the existing large supermarkets. When these incumbents achieved larger volume sales, they can have lower unit costs than new entrants, and it will very difficult for those new entrants to compete with them (Johnson, Whittington, &Scholes 2011). For example, Wal-Mart had invested in innovative procurement, automated distribution centre and bar coding to increase its economies of scale, and these investments created a great barriers for new small retailers to enter into the supermarket industry (Porter 2008). The second barrier is the incumbency advantages, which mean the incumbents established their own strengths that cannot be used by competitors (Porter 2008). For example, the top ten supermarkets in US have accumulated extensive experiences on how to run their businesses more efficiently than new entrants (Johnson, Whittington, &Scholes 2011). The subtle differentiation between the products that sold in supermarkets is the third barrier for new entrants. Because most of the product assortment is same or similar between each supermarket,

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.

Bargaining Power of Buyers: The bargaining power of buyers is high in the department store retail industry. The volume of buyers is high, and buyers are very price sensitive in this industry. The products are not highly differentiated, and there are numerous stores that offer the same, or similar, products, giving buyers the opportunity to search for the lowest prices and information. The industry has substitutes available in the form of specialty, differentiated products and stores. This increases the power of buyers,

Technology is/and still playing a vital role in any business. The growth of online selling in the UK and the world has led to large increase in its online sales. The raising numbers of people, who own computers, smartphones and tablets; and having access to internet which has a high positive impact for their online sales. As there is an increase in demand of new technology, developments of new tablets, computers are rising in popularity and John Lewis sells a wide range of these. For John Lewis to keep up with the demands of their customers they had to move in-line with the recent development of new

Market players generally have a wide variety of potential customers, which considerably weakens buyer power. Although consumers in this industry may be loyal to particular brands or chains, loyalty to retailer brands is arguably less important than competitive pricing. Many supermarkets run rewards programs for frequent shoppers, such as Tesco’s ‘Clubcard’, and these schemes can help companies retain customers and reduce buyer power.

Because Woolworths and Coles generally have homogenous products, they rely on a heavy use of advertising, in order to avoid competitive pricing with each other. Oligopolies tend to avoid competitive pricing at all costs, as the worst case scenario of this is a price war, which generally cannot be escaped, resulting in one survivor, who goes on to become the monopolist.

The Five Forces Model as defined by Dr. Michael Porter of Harvard University uses five different strategic factors to explain Competitive Rivalry a company or industry faces. The fiver forces that comprise the model are Bargaining Power of Suppliers, Bargaining Power of Buyers, Threat of Substitute Products, Potential Entrants and Completive Rivalry (Porter, 2008). The intent of this analysis is to rank-order each of these five factors from the standpoint of their influence on Target Corporation (NYSE:TGT) and their competitive position in the retailing industry. Each of the five forces are rank-ordered in terms of their importance to Target.

New South Wales, Victoria and Queensland are the regions contributing over 75% of the 18.9 billion industry revenue. Westfarmers (Target and Kmart) and Woolworths (BigW) are the two largest companies competing on low-cost strategies (Porter, 1980). Myers and David Jones, holding 15.3% and 10.5% market shares respectively (Figure 1), compete on differentiated strategies targeting the upper consumer market (Porter, 1980). Over 10% of the total working population are employed in this industry (Productivity Commission, 2011).

In this assignment I will identify what competitive factors and changes Tesco faces in the retail sector and how it might respond to these under the following headings; retail environment using PESTEL, and competitive environment based on overcoming barriers to entry, pricing, new markets and mobile population. In this assignment I will be talking about how Porter’s five forces are being used by Tesco.

Grocery industry is a highly competitive market with thin profit margins. Super markets are dominant players in the grocery industry. They use grocery offerings to drive traffic to their higher profit margin retail items. With its operations efficiency, Walmart, the largest grocery retailer has been able to offer significant price drops. This also forces other grocery stores to drop prices which keeps the profit margin thin. Even with all the advantages of operational efficiency and economies of scale, Walmart’s share in grocery sales was down at 51% in 2011.

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