Ranking of retail chains stays the same: Tesco leads, followed by two Hungarian chains

Nielsen’s 2009 ranking shows that Tesco is the food and chemical product retailer with the highest turnover, followed by CBA and Coop. Just like a year earlier, Spar and Reál come next in the ranking. Tesco’s turnover was HUF 638.4 billion, CBA realised HUF 547.5 billion and Co-op performed at HUF 510 billion. Food retail continues to concentrate: hypermarkets represent less than 1 percent of all food stores in Hungary, but they realised 38 percent of the total household chemical and cosmetics turnover and 31 percent of food turnover last year. Shopping efficiency is becoming increasingly important and low price in itself is not among the most important factors in deciding where to go shopping – it has become a basic equirement of consumers.

Tesco operates 176 stores, out of which 102 are hypermarkets. The company opened 13 new hyper- and 17 new supermarkets.

Interspar opened one (and now has 31) and Auchan two (they have 12 units altogether) new hypermarkets last year. Auchan’s turnover grew by 2 percent and reached HUF 226.3 billion, taking over the sixth place in the ranking from Metro.

CBA runs 3,054 stores, Coop has 5,250 and Reál operates 2,320 units. These three Hungarian-owned chains represent more than half of the total Hungarian food retail network.

Discount stores were the winners of the past period, according to Nielsen’s estimate the joint annual turnover of Lidl, Penny Market, Aldi and Profi had been HUF 379.3 billion in 2008, which increased by 14 percent to HUF 430.8 billion in 2009. From their value sales private label food products carved out 54 percent, while private label household chemical and cosmetics products had a 56-percent share. As for their ranking, Lidl and Penny Market kept their position, but with 13 new stores Aldi (now they have 58) changed last year’s 15th position to the 13th.