Mercator Swot Analysis

1. INTRODUCTION
The consumer retail industry is a multi-million euro business and with the ever growing competitive market, players in this field have to strategize ways of remaining in business and growing. Mercator retail chain originating from Slovenia has not been left behind. After being in business for many a year, they have learnt to understand the importance of knowing their customer and the role they play in Mercator 's future plans. Our research looks at the Mercator’s understanding of this and how they use data collected from loyalty card holders to understand trends, preferences and by extension help the retail chain strategize future plans of making the best of the prevailing market conditions. For this research we shall assume

Absolute sales are almost double as high for hypermarkets. It is obvious that discounters, such as Lidl or Aldi, pose a threat to many more “traditional” retailers. Their aggressive growth and growing consumer base, puts a lot of pressure on its competitors. Manufactures are also affected by this change. They oftentimes struggle to get into the listings of the discounters. The discounters also want to differentiate themselves, which requires their manufactures to accept a new set of product specifications; thus they have an increased cost. After testing the waters in eastern Europe 's capitals, from which they slowly spread into the respective mainland, the discounters started moving into the Baltics and former Yugoslavia. Here they gain much appreciation due to the low incomes (Planer, 2007). Hypermarkets act as a response to these discounters. When investigating the effects of market power in the retail industry Cotterill found three correlations (1986). Generally market power describes a companies’ relative ability to manipulate an items price through the manipulation of supply, demand or both. The first conclusion he came to was that different firms in the retail industry charge different prices upon their individual characteristics and the imperfect pricing information available to the customers. Secondly he found that an increased market concentration, as measured through concentration ratios or market share, has a big impact upon firm price levels (Cotterill, 1986). The market is dominated by a few players. In 2007 to 2008 food prices increased rapidly and could not be explained compared to the international level. This had to effect that the Slovene Competition Protection Office examined the possibility of hidden price agreements between the retailers with a special focus on Mercator, which is Slovenia’s biggest retailer (OECD,