In the 1990s, the term “modern grocery retail” was essentially a proxy for a small group of multinational grocers including Ahold, Aldi, Auchan, Carrefour, Costco, Lidl, Metro, Tesco, and Walmart. It was widely presumed that these retailers’ entry into any market would lead to the demise of the traditional trade—the family-owned grocery chains, small independent stores, and informal merchants that at the time accounted for the vast majority of grocery sales in emerging markets. The prevailing expectation was that although there would be local differences due to cultural specificities, in every country the retail landscape would eventually consist of a combination of modern formats: full-line supermarkets and hypermarkets, convenience stores, and discounters.
These assumptions have been proved wrong. Global grocery giants are struggling to grow profitably in many emerging markets. Traditional trade has proved remarkably resilient. And the market and channel structures taking shape in individual emerging economies are distinct from one another, following no obvious pattern.
Bill Fulkerson on 29 Jul 20Most recent macro trends - cloud compute, social, mobile, crypto, AI - that have reshaped the technology landscape are rooted in new technical capabilities or pushing the frontier of product form factors. Another shock to the system is emerging today, driven not by the underlying technology, but by an evolution in customer buying behavior. For shorthand, we think of this trend as "growth+sales": the bottom-up growth motion eventually layered with top-down sales.
