Tesco's Journey: From Market Gap to Global Dominance

Tesco was founded by a young entrepreneur called Jack Cohen. He immigrated to East London just after world war 1 from Poland. Being just after the war supplies and rations were low, Jack saw a gap in the market and started to buy damaged products from bigger businesses for little costs and sold for reasonable prices which gave him a decent profit. The brand first appeared in the early 1920s selling mostly groceries. His first major product was a large shipment of tea he brought from another business man called T.

E Stockwell.

He created the name Tesco by using the first three letters of Stockwell's name and the first two letters of his last name to make "Tesco". Rise to the top: In the early 1990s Tesco had 371 stores nationwide and the company became one of the top three food retailers in the United Kingdom. Tesco wanted to become number 1, so they started a two year, 1 billion pound development which added 60 new stores across England and Wales.

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This was just 1 step for them to become number 1, another clever thing which they did was add 40 metro stores which were only 10,000 square feet long so it was perfect for urban areas and neighbourhoods.

More importantly for the long term Tesco brought Catteau a 92 store grocery chain in northern France for i?? 175 million. However Catteau struggled against rival firms such as Promodes ; Carrefour. Tesco tried desperately hard to compete but it failed in the tough market place of France. Eventually Tesco sold Catteau to Promodes in December 1997 for a profit of  75 million.

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However Tesco made more moves across Europe which were more successful and to other parts of the world. The present:

Tesco now owns 2,316 stores across the world in countries such as Hungry, Malaysia and the US with over 326,000 employees. Almost  1 out of every  3 is spent in Tesco in UK supermarkets. This has created a massive gross profit of over  2 billion, a 20% increase from the year 2004. This was achieved by many reasons. One main reason is how Tesco introduced market segmentation. Tesco value is purposely created for the poorer and lower class people, Tesco normal brand for the average earners and Tesco finest for the upper class.

Secondly Tesco's club card was and still is a huge success. The idea of vouchers for a persons loyalty and money really appealed to the public which attracted customers from other supermarket chains. So Sainsbury's copied the idea and created their own nectar card. Also Tesco now has a range of products you can buy from Shops and online from DVDs ; CDs to all types of insurance. Consumers love the idea of being able to buy everything you would like in one store. All these reasons put Tesco high and above their competition in a competitive market place.

These are the results of Tesco price check. It clearly shows that it is cheaper than the other big supermarkets. This will certainly appeal to consumers. Tesco's prices attract consumers away from other leading supermarkets. Tesco can keep there prices low all the time because of there variety of products, not only groceries and provisions. They have so much you could buy such as DVDs, CDs, travel insurance, car insurance, clothes and electrical appliances plus much more. Also home deliveries so you don't have to carry heavy stuff when you are leaving.

The prices are fixed for home delivery, they charge  4. 85 for next day delivery and  6. 85 for delivery in two hours. Further more you could buy electrical goods over the internet such as a electric cooker which they will install for only  55. 00. This graph shows the increase of sales, in the UK and overseas through 2001 to February 2005. The graph shows that there has been an increase of 15 billion sales in the UK and 5 billion overseas. This graph shows the profit for Tesco's through 1999 to 2004.

As you can see there is low profit margin in the year 2000, they were in danger of being took over. This was the time when they introduced all there ideas such as market segmentation and the club card. This was a tremendous success resulting in higher profits for the next 4 years. This is a graph that shows the number of jobs Tesco has created during the period of 1999 to 2003 in the UK. It shows there was a increase of 2500 workers from 1999 to 2003 and due to the demands of consumers more and more staff will be hired to cope with the enormous pressure from the consumers of Great Britain.

Conclusion: So in conclusion Tesco has created its tremendous success with great thinking and products that appeal to consumers world wide. The high demand for high-quality products that Tesco's produces has been brilliantly managed by there staff which has put Tesco way ahead of the competition. Low prices for top-quality products attracts the general public in to Tesco's, not only in the UK but all over the world. What frightens the competition is Tesco is still not at it's peak and will continue to grow for many years to come.

Updated: Nov 30, 2023
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Tesco's Journey: From Market Gap to Global Dominance. (2020, Jun 01). Retrieved from https://studymoose.com/a-young-entrepreneur-new-essay

Tesco's Journey: From Market Gap to Global Dominance essay
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