Mese: Luglio 2019

Tesco is to open 750 convenience stores in Thailand over the next three years in its first major overseas expansion under chief executive Dave Lewis. Thailand is the grocery group’s biggest market outside the UK and its most profitable.

Lewis, 54, who was parachuted into the supermarket chain in 2014 after it ran adrift under previous management, believes that Thailand offers a huge opportunity because of its young, increasingly urban and affluent population. ‘The economics of the country are very attractive. There is a big emerging middle class” he said.

Tesco has been in Thailand since 1998. It employs 46,000 full-time staff there and operates under the Tesco Lotus brand. The group has more than 1,500 Express convenience stores and around 400 larger shops, including some hypermarkets. It also owns shopping malls and until recently was involved in the wholesale market.

Lewis’s move will create up to 10,000 new jobs in the country. He said he sees large scope for growth, as around half of the Thai food shopping market consists of traditional markets, street stalls and small family-owned shops. Profits in Asia, which also includes its Malaysian operation, were down 4.3 per cent last year, though Lewis attributes this to a restructuring in Thailand, including a withdrawal from the wholesale operations. He shut down a bulk selling business in 2017 that serviced independent merchants after concluding it was unlikely to become profitable. ‘We have been making changes over the past two years but now we have a model we are very pleased with,’ he said.

Tesco is likely to face stiff competition from Japanese-US business 7-Eleven, which has thousands of its convenience stores in Thailand, where the brand is run by locally listed company CP All.

In the past, Tesco has run into rough waters with some of its overseas forays. It pulled out of an ill-fated venture into the US through its Fresh & Easy chain on the West Coast in 2013. The failure to win over US shoppers cost it around £1.2billion.

Lord MacLaurin, a former chairman, recently attacked ex-chief executive Sir Terry Leahy, whose decision it was to go into the US market on the eve of the financial crisis, accusing him of having an ‘arrogant’ and ‘extravagant’ management style.

Lewis sees the Thai move as part of his strategy to move the company on after its recovery from the scandal that engulfed it under his predecessors. A £250million black hole in the accounts came to light shortly after his arrival and Tesco posted a record pre-tax loss of £6.4billion in 2015. Under his stewardship, the group has returned to profit, with a 28.8pc jump last year to £1.7billion.

Source: thisismoney.co.uk

Britain’s biggest retailer Tesco is trialing a checkout-free method of payment for its convenience stores, allowing customers to scan products on their mobile devices and then walk out with them.

The supermarket group is testing the smartphone app at the Tesco Express convenience store located in the campus of its headquarters at Welwyn Garden City, north of London.

“Using your mobile device you select some products, put them into your basket on your device and then just walk out of the store,” Steven Blair, Tesco’s convenience transformation director told reporters.

“The feedback is very good on it but it’s super early,” said Blair.

U.S. giant Amazon opened a checkout-free grocery store in Seattle to the public in January, moving forward on an experiment that could dramatically alter bricks-and-mortar retail.

The Seattle store, known as Amazon Go, relies on cameras and sensors to track what shoppers remove from the shelves, and what they put back. Cash registers and checkout lines become superfluous – customers are billed after leaving the store using credit cards on file.

Tesco Chief Executive Dave Lewis said although the Welwyn trial was scalable, security implications had to be considered as there was a danger of increased product theft.

“If the margin in the business is 2 or 3 percent, you don’t have to lose much to make it unprofitable,” he said.

The Welwyn store is also cashless, cutting the time spent on customer transactions.

Blair said the store was serving customers at its checkouts in about 45 seconds, versus 90 seconds for a similar sized store in the estate.

He noted that some Tesco convenience stores in Britain were already down to just 20 percent of payments by cash, making a cashless roll-out likely in the future.

Source:Reuters

Walmart’s Mexico unit has begun offering grocery delivery from its Superama stores via messaging service WhatsApp, in a new stab at attracting shoppers outside bricks-and-mortar supermarkets.

WhatsApp, the free text-messaging service owned by social media platform Facebook, is ubiquitous throughout Mexico. Superama shoppers can text an order to a WhatsApp number run by Walmart, known in Mexico as Walmart de Mexico.

A Reuters reporter tried the service on Monday, sending a photo of a handwritten grocery list. A company representative responded immediately, punctuating responses with smiley-face and winky-face emojis.

The representative said Superama charges 49 pesos ($2.55) for delivery within 90 minutes, or 39 pesos ($2.03) for a later delivery time, and would accept payment in cash or by card upon delivery.

Superama represents about 92 of Walmart’s 2,459 stores in Mexico, which is the U.S. retailer’s largest overseas market by store count. Superama already takes orders via its website and a Superama app, as well as through Cornershop, a third-party delivery app that sells goods for a variety of other stores.

Walmart’s plan to buy Cornershop, which operates in Mexico and Chile, for $225 million, was blocked earlier this month by Mexico’s competition regulator, which said that Walmart could not guarantee an even playing field for rivals also using the app.

Source: Reuters