A study by the Consumer Goods Forum and Planet Retail, to coincide with the start of the Consumer Goods Forum Global Summit in Cape Town, has found that retailers are ‘going global’ at a faster rate than at any other time this decade.
The Internationalisation of Retail study found that last year, the top 100 retailers in the grocery and health and beauty sectors increased the number of countries in which they operate by more than at any time since 2011.
These retailers added a total of 27 new markets between them in 2015, compared to just 17 in the two years previous.
Compared to any other region, Africa and the Middle East have accounted for the largest number of new market entries by the top 100 retailers since 2010, with Spar and Circle K among those expanding their operations in these regions.
The study also found that retailers are increasingly teaming up to ‘tap into some of the benefits of internationalisation while mitigating risk and investment’. An example of this is the recent link-up between Tesco and El Corte Inglés on private-label distribution.
At the same time, there has been an increased tendency towards expansion within one or two geographic regions, as opposed to global expansion. Tesco and Casino, for example, have both withdrawn from selected countries in Asia, but retain strong regional positions in Central Europe and Latin America, respectively.
“The forces of globalisation are adapting to new economic and geopolitical realities,” said Robert Gregory, global research director at Planet Retail. “This is evident in the way leading retailers are becoming more selective about the markets they invest in.
“In some respects, it’s the reverse of what we saw a decade ago, when leading players could be accused of planting flags in a number of markets on the assumption that rewards would follow ‘in the long term’. This is a welcome development and the beginning of a new era in globalisation, marked by a more heightened regional focus.”
© 2016 European Supermarket Magazine – your source for the latest retail news. Article by Stephen Wynne-Jones. To subscribe to ESM: The European Supermarket Magazine, click here.
