Lidl’s big leap to the 2nd place

Every year Trade magazin publishes its FMCG retailer ranking in early June. 2019 was an even better year for grocery retailers than the previous 12 months, and the ranking reveals that the market expanded by 6 percent.

Zsuzsanna Hermann
managing director-editor-in-chief
Trade magazin

Tesco has remained the No.1 retailer, but 2nd placed Lidl and 3rd placed SPAR are closer to Tesco than before. In the case of COOP, CBA and Reál it must be mentioned that although their sales revenues only increased by a few percent, they achieved this result with fewer stores than last year.

2019 was the year of important investment and development projects for basically all retail chains. Retailers also took steps in the direction of sustainability with great success. Many of them started or improved their online services and this came at the right time, as in mid-March the world around us changed in basically two weeks. Perhaps the biggest shock was how suddenly the whole thing happened. Luckily the FMCG market was among the most important sectors that kept the world going, on both the supplier and the retailer sides.

All retailers deserve the biggest respect for serving the customers, filling the shelves…doing their job every day at the time of the pandemic too, taking a big risk in order to satisfy customer needs; and of course this couldn’t have happened without those working at the suppliers fulfilling their obligations, too. I hope that soon things will get back to normal in every field of life. I would like to believe that being a small country with few consumers now has an advantage: we can make decisions quickly when there is an emergency, adapting to the new conditions and gaining momentum again. //