dc.description.abstract | During year 2007 to 2012 as the world faces global economy issues, from the trend of everyone’s disposable incomes, daily expense, and savings, we see no decrease over gross national expenditures. The major problem is the rise of commodities prices. Consumers must find a balance between income and expense. Thus, people choose to be strict on the day-to-day expense, which directly affects the retail business. Yet, the retail market in Taiwan is highly competitive. The changes of economy environment cause impacts. Low price and convenient neighborhood supermarkets have been blooming. The increasing rate of neighborhood supermarkets in year 2012 is only second to convenience stores, and the market share is about the same of hyper markets. New to competitive markets, such as TV shopping and internet shopping, are also rising and flourishing. Consumers have more channels of shopping, and therefore their values change.
The rapid increase of chain supermarkets changes the market structure of retail business. The management of hypermarkets experiences these impacts. Under the highly competitive environment, the concentration of market and the profitability has an adverse relationship; business that has higher market concentration often has lower profitability. As to satisfy customers, every major retail channel must invest more. This study is to investigate the management strategy of the 3 major retail businesses in Taiwan and their influence over the market, to analyze the strength of retail business which enables them to stay in the highly competitive environment, and to find out the factors that might limit their growing.
The business size in retail is related with the business model. Business model decides the product choices, product price ranges, and services. It also affects the average basket, debits, and customers visit frequency, sales, and stores catchment areas. Although supermarkets and hypermarkets category in the same business, their business patterns are very different. Different management strategies are applied by Hypermarkets with membership and non-membership. Customer value determines upon the business patterns, none of those 3 cases in this study can fully satisfy customers’ needs. Customers have to shop in different forms of stores to meet different needs. From customers’ point of view, the true meaning of one-stop shopping is about the sum of these 3 forms of retail business. In that case, we see the biggest limit that stops the chain retails nowadays from growing is the serious overlapping of consumers and markets; similar forms of supermarkets and hypermarkets are way too much, and there are no real differences. Or one that finally comes out with a great idea but then the rest starts to imitate. The management cost increases, profit gets lower, struggling with expanding, and customer value and claim changes make it difficult for the retail chains to attract consumers. The habit change over consuming, the convenience to shop, no more shop a big amount of items at one time, and the drop off of the younger generation financial capacity which causes the descends of purchasing capability make the price competition in the future market extremely severe.
This study proposes suggestions as the following by discussing business patterns of the case’s company and the problems they face:
1. To discover and develop potential opportunities within markets, by renovate business value to obtain higher growth, and create products and services with indirect competition.
2. To establish the customer loyalty, by building up a precise systemic connection with consumers, meet consumers demand, and focus on consumers’ positions.
3. To expand in both the virtual and the actual; allow different forms of shops to cut into different markets.
4. To increase sense of trust, by developing suitable and qualified assortments for consumers. Set up a clear assortment structure and price ranges, make shopping efficient for customers!
5. To build up consumers’ confidence with price image, by stabilizing prices and providing products with fair price value.
The conclusion of this study: to continuously growing in the highly concentrated business, retailers must fills up the gaps of its own and those between the competitors. That is, retailers have to develop different products, service, and markets that haven’t been provided yet, to obtain new opportunities and keep expanding the markets. | en_US |