from James Ensor, managing director, Strategic Vision, London
Sir; Andrew Fowler's view (The Grocer, Saturday Essay, October 5) that the City looks for growth is well founded. Food retailers have grown fast.
Our research shows that over the past four years the compound annual growth of food sales of Tesco and Safeway have been 15% and Morrisons' 23%. Carrefour and Champion, boosted by acquisitions, have managed over 30% in European food. Average growth for the top 10 retail brands last year was 16%. Few IT or telecom companies could match this.
Yet this supposedly defensive investment sector has seen individual share price decline by almost half and the top 10 food retailers in Europe lost a quarter of their value this year.
Since we continue to eat, wash and drink even while some US telecom companies "cook the books", this hardly seems rational.
Have retailers done enough to blow their own trumpets? Any retail journalist can point to poor service from one or more of the leading supermarket chains. City analysts make the same complaint about investor relations staff, although in our experience in dealing with both, they try harder to be helpful.
Leading British retailers have much to be proud of in terms of own label development, logistics improvement, merchandising and store design, and, yes, growth. Yet, except in the pages of The Grocer, there is little reporting of these achievements.
The City pages of the national press for months preferred to focus on dotcom start-ups rather than billion pound grocery businesses. So why did the City pour money into hopeful grocery home deliverers, now mostly moribund, instead of into Tesco, the only company so far to claim a profit in this game?
{{COMMENT & LETTERS }}
Sir; Andrew Fowler's view (The Grocer, Saturday Essay, October 5) that the City looks for growth is well founded. Food retailers have grown fast.
Our research shows that over the past four years the compound annual growth of food sales of Tesco and Safeway have been 15% and Morrisons' 23%. Carrefour and Champion, boosted by acquisitions, have managed over 30% in European food. Average growth for the top 10 retail brands last year was 16%. Few IT or telecom companies could match this.
Yet this supposedly defensive investment sector has seen individual share price decline by almost half and the top 10 food retailers in Europe lost a quarter of their value this year.
Since we continue to eat, wash and drink even while some US telecom companies "cook the books", this hardly seems rational.
Have retailers done enough to blow their own trumpets? Any retail journalist can point to poor service from one or more of the leading supermarket chains. City analysts make the same complaint about investor relations staff, although in our experience in dealing with both, they try harder to be helpful.
Leading British retailers have much to be proud of in terms of own label development, logistics improvement, merchandising and store design, and, yes, growth. Yet, except in the pages of The Grocer, there is little reporting of these achievements.
The City pages of the national press for months preferred to focus on dotcom start-ups rather than billion pound grocery businesses. So why did the City pour money into hopeful grocery home deliverers, now mostly moribund, instead of into Tesco, the only company so far to claim a profit in this game?
{{COMMENT & LETTERS }}
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