Foreign markets – Spain: Supermarkets dominate, discounts gaining ground

Out of 100 Spanish households, 58 spend the most money on food, household chemicals and cosmetics in supermarkets. For the Spanish, the most important in choosing a shop is a good service and easily finding the products they need. In Spain, there are many special stores for fresh food, offering mainly bread and bakery products, fruits and vegetables. Among shop types, bakeries take the lead in terms of shopping frequency, with an average of 18 monthly shoppings per household. Supermarkets come second with 10, followed by fruit-vegetable shops (7), fishmongers and butchers (6-6) and traditional stores, hypermarkets and discounts (6-6). Mercadona realised the biggest food product sales in 2008, by improving 10 percent to reach EUR 14.2 billion. They stopped selling 1,000 branded products in the last three months of 2008, and only a part of these was substituted by private label products. Besides, they decreased consumer prices in two phases, by more than 20 percent. As a result, the number of their customers augmented by 60,000. Carrefour’s sales reached EUR 11.9 billion, while food, household chemicals and cosmetics sales by El Corte Inglés (Spain’s biggest retail company) amounted to EUR 5.4 billion. According to the Nielsen Growthreporter analysis, food sales were up by 2.6 percent in value and 2.3 percent in volume in the first quarter of the year. In the second quarter, there was a 0.8 percent growth in volume, but a 0.8 percent decrease in value, compared to the same period in the previous year.