Magazine: Hypermarkets and drugstores in an expanding market

Péter Kurucz
retailer services director
Nielsen

At the Business Days conference Péter Kurucz, retailer services director of Nielsen gave a presentation about drugstores and hypermarkets. The director revealed that Hungarians had more money to spend and thanks to this they stated to buy more premium products. He added that in line with this, price consciousness had also increased – by 10 percent in just one year: in 2017 already 75 percent of shoppers said that they knew the prices of products they were buying.

Between July 2017 and June 2018 the FMCG market expanded by 7.4 percent – sales of hypermarkets grew by 2.8 percent and sales by drugstores augmented by 11.1 percent. Average monthly spending was up 14 percent in 2017 at approximately HUF 49,000. One of the trends is that shoppers switched from one big monthly shopping to smaller ones once a week or every second week. Hypermarkets aren’t really used any more to satisfy daily FMCG product needs, but they are the place where shoppers go if they want to stockpile or if there is some special occasion.

Drugstores’ customers are more loyal that the average FMCG buyer: while in the FMCG market the level of being loyal to a given retail chain dropped from 19 percent to 13 percent, with drugstores it increased from 50 percent to 57 percent. Mr Kurucz told: drugstores are the driving force of the FMCG sales growth; hypermarkets are struggling a bit, but they can keep up with market trends and contribute to the sales growth.