Retailers to the world

A virtuous cycle of self-reinforcing benefits will permit certain companies to redefine--and control--the industry I Even so, retailers still have enough time to build cross-border positions and local-market defenses For years, as leaders in many industries expanded abroad, retailers stayed at home. The exceptions were mostly European companies that had exhausted opportunities to grow in their relatively small domestic markets. As recently as 1996, foreign sales accounted for only 12 percent of the turnover of the world's top five retailers--a percentage far exceeded in industries as diverse as entertainment (34 percent), aerospace (35 percent), banking (48 percent), and petroleum refining (66 percent). Indeed, from 1990 to 1995, when other industries were sharply increasing the proportion of sales they transacted abroad, the mix of retailing stayed more or less unchanged. But the business is now following the lead of other industries by globalizing, chiefly because of an expanding consumer arena, technological advances, deregulation, and the retailers' need to grow. The prime movers in this process, such as Carrefour, Wal-Mart, and Ahold, are helping to create new rules for retailers in general--expansion minded or not. When Wal-Mart, for example, bought two German retail chains within six months, it became the fourth-largest owner of hypermarkets in Germany and restructured the market there. As global forces gather momentum and reshape the competitive environment, successful global players are going to create a virtuous cycle of self-reinforcing benefits that will give them the ability to redefine the economics of the retailing industry and, ultimately, to establish strategic control around the world. A quick catch-up Unlike companies in other industries, retailers have not been able to travel light: those seeking to establish new markets abroad must find suitable high-quality sites, develop distribution support systems, and deal with the complexities of local zoning regulations, tariffs, and quotas, as well as understand local tastes and manage local labor forces. Combine these difficulties with the intrinsic complexity of retailing--hundreds of stock-keeping units, rapid price changes, and the constant threat of product obsolescence--with the minimal incremental scale benefits retailers can achieve if they are already big, and it is clear why most US retailers have restricted their growth to North America and most of their European counterparts have stuck to Western Europe. Nonetheless, rising incomes and improvements in infrastructure are enlarging consumer markets around the world and accelerating the convergence of consumer tastes. The Internet is making customers more accessible, while computers and videoconferencing are cutting the cost of doing business far from headquarters. At the same time, deregulation, the dismantling of trade barriers, and the single European currency are--albeit slowly--generating unprecedented levels of mergers-and-acquisitions activity among retailers in Asia, Europe, and North America. While the barriers to globalization have fallen, so have the growth rates of retailers in the United States and Europe. Since retailers are already consolidating in their domestic and regional markets (Exhibit 1), the next step is to look farther afield, as Wal-Mart, Carrefour, and Ahold have already done. Wal-Mart, based entirely in the United States until 1991, now has more than 700 stores in Canada, South America, Europe, and Asia--mostly gained through acquisitions. Carrefour, which has been playing the international game for upward of 30 years, built strong store networks across three continents. Ahold has bought businesses in more than ten countries in the past five years. Not surprisingly, two of these three companies are European retailers that have gained cross-border experience on the Continent and now seek to apply their skills in more distant markets. …