Tesco is one of the worlds leading international retailers. Since the company first the trading name of Tesco, in the mid 1920s, the group has expanded into different formats, different markets and different sectors. The UKs leading retailer Tesco was floated on the stock exchange in 1947 and in 1995 took over rival Sainsburys position as the UK number one. The principal activity of the group is food retailing, with over 2,000 stores worldwide. Tesco has a long term strategy for growth, based on four key parts: growth in the Core UK business, to expand by growing internationally, to be as strong in non-food as in food and to follow customers into new retailing services. The company launched a home shopping service in 2000, allowing customers to order their shopping online. Tesco is now expanding its convenience stores and overseas into areas such as Taiwan, Malaysia, Poland, the US and Ireland.

Upper graph = 12 month share price with 6 month moving average
Lower graph = 12 month volume (red line = volume average).

Your right Chris.

Sharecast - Tesco is testing a discount format in its One Stop chain, indicating the group could be considering new ways to combat Aldi and Lidl, the Sunday Times said. Three One Stop branches have been trading as discounters with low prices and limited ranges for the past seven weeks. The trial is the idea of One Stop's boss Tony Reed and is not monitored by Tesco's board.

I certainly would not buy and lease back their stores , praying they are going to be able to lease for the 25yr period etc. Tesco do not even know their destination. They are to late in post 1332.

Tesco launches fresh discounting drive to combat rise of Lidl and Aldi as share of the market falls to 29% this year and accounting scandal takes its toll



http://www.dailymail.co.uk/money/markets/article-2889231/Tesco-launches-fresh-discounting-drive-combat-rise-Lidl-Aldi-share-market-falls-29-year-accounting-scandal-takes-toll.html

Trading statement 08 Jan 15 Tesco PLC [TSCO]

Tesco may have to find £300m a year to plug pensions hole

Retailer facing prospect of having to inject extra cash into employees’ retirement fund every year for next decade

The retailer has sought to correct the funding problems and in its 2013 financial year made an additional injection of £180m, on top of other routine contributions designed to reduce the deficit on the scheme.

The one-off top-up dropped to £4m in 2014. Tesco declined to explain the marked difference between the two figures.



http://www.theguardian.com/business/2014/dec/28/tesco-300m-pensions-hole

TalkTalk moves to relieve Tesco of loss-making Blinkbox venture


http://www.theguardian.com/media/2014/dec/29/blinkbox-tesco-sale-talktalk-video-streaming-service

My take on what Dave should do or I would if in his seat. :-))

First profit margins must be SLASHED. Tesco are now 6% up on ASDA. In the past there was only a 1% variation. National pricing must be abandoned. Rents in the most expensive areas are up to 6 times the level of the cheapest areas, wages are 20% higher. Despite this, Tesco offers the same product at the same price level. The discounters LOVE it. Many of Tesco's stores are in the wrong areas ie out of town. The old man in the past would not pay out for the no1 first class position and took the second best. Which performed back in the past, but not now with shopping habits changing . Many of Tesco stores (about 50%) are over the 50,000sq ft plus bracket. With shoppers proved now to prefer quick shops . A lot of these larger stores are losing money or could come under pressure with loss of footfall. Crazy to keep loss making stores, going to have to be sold off.
I see they are trying out 3 stores with set ups like Aldi etc. All these are up North and are owned by Tesco but not under the name. Not really a big enough pilot scheme . Could of run the scheme with a lot more stores and South as well.
They have clear problems between the discounters attacking them and the more up market likes of Sainsbury and waitrose. Two different extremes of the market then have to be dealt with. No good Tesco becoming a discounter because the likes of as said Sains etc will carry on nibbling away. Tesco has got to become not a discounter but a great value alternative. Its going to be the cheapest option as the whole set up is wrong to join the discounters. As said before the announcement in the next few days wants to be open and clear to where Tesco can carve out a niche position in the grocery business. Tesco needs also to get its trust back with the public, difficult but possible. Clearly now Tesco are well down the road without achieving much of a turn around under the last exited board members and Dave has got to come up trumps very soon, otherwise he will join them.

Grocery shopping is a peculiar subject to analyse and I don't think you can put your finger on just one thing, like say 'price'.

And it isn't going to be the sole thing which is going to win customers' business.

As I shop sometimes in Waitrose, I just cannot see some of their punters ever wanting to 'lower their obvious snobby standards' and join the ranks of the masses, who shop purely to save money at Aldi. And, at Waitrose, you do get a free cappucino to sip from a paper cup whilst you are doing your shopping.

I do like 'self scanning' and this is now offered at my local Tesco as well as Waitrose.

I also like 'Free Parking'. Other than the Tesco and M&S in the middle of town, they all of them have this.

Overall, my favourite is actually my local big Tesco, where I have noted a happier more caring atmosphere amongst the staff, an upgrade to its 'physicality' and lots of 'buzz'.

When mr average is trying to save for a pension and heat the house and pay bills, I would think price ranks very high on the agenda. The type of class/quality of shoppers here in Bishops Stortford at the Aldi store in town are from working class to very well off. There are many Big Bmw's/Mercs parked in the car park. Even the very well off seem to have principles to being ripped off.

IMO...the big main supermarkets have lost the initiative and the understanding of how to win customers back into their stores - away from LIDL / ALDI. They simply 'DON'T Get it' and think that by reducing the 'quantity of product' sold, so that they can match the price of discounters, that this will draw punters back.

However Joe Punter is far more savvy than Supermarket management teams believe, as families now match '£ / £' and 'kg / kg', along with comparable quality of the grocery product they are selling. People are getting wise to the 2-4-1 rip off scam.

The quicker main stream supermarkets reevaluate their offerings vs LIDL / ALDI profiles, the quicker confidence & trust will return families to main supermarkets.

IMO,

HAb

The size of a typical Aldi store is inadequate. When the store gets busy, the staff get hammered to hell with a massive and impossibly high work load. There isn't room on the shelves for the stock and there isn't room on the floor for the full and empty boxes or the pallets or even the staff and the pallet carriers.

Sometimes it is a truly horrible shopping experience.

The Aldi shopping experience can be quite easy to beat.

Locally to me and IMHO:

Tesco willl succeed.
Morrisons will fail.
Sainsbury's haven't much of a clue.
Waitrose are doing OK.
Aldi are going to peak.
I'm confused about Lidl: e.g., Their wine brochure is a phenominally brilliant production - but it is impossible to find the stuff on their shelves because of poor shelf displays. The same shelf problem goes for Sainsbury's.

Aldi has come under fire from the Advertising Standards Authority (ASA) after Tesco complained that its 'Swap & Save' price comparisons were incorrect.
In the television and print adverts, shoppers spoke about going to Aldi instead of their usual supermarket, with one saying: “We've saved so much on out weekly shop”. The ASA agreed that Aldi offered savings, but it banned the ads on the basis they exaggerated how many people had taken part in the swap.
Aldi said Swap & Save diverged from traditional comparative advertising because it examined overall shopping costs at a single store over an extended period of time, rather than the prices of individual products or a standardised basket of shopping.
“We told Aldi Stores Ltd to ensure that in future the basis for comparisons was made clear and did not mislead, and that their comparisons were verifiable,” the ASA said.
Aldi's joint managing director of corporate buying, Giles Hurley, said: “It is important to be clear that the ASA has endorsed the validity of the Swap & Save campaign.
“We recognise that the decision to uphold competitor representations was technical in its nature and, because of this, we will respect the finding and have addressed the issues that it raised.”

Tesco head of remuneration committee to step down

Overhaul of supermarket’s board continues with replacement of Stuart Chambers, but he will remain on the board

The Guardian, Wednesday 31 December 2014 18.08 GMT

Tesco's board is undergoing upheaval in the wake of the discovery of a £263m profits black hole. Photograph: Felix Clay for the Guardian


The head of Tesco’s remuneration committee is to step down from the role in the latest overhaul of the supermarket’s board of directors.

Stuart Chambers, the former chief executive of glassmaker Pilkington who has sat on Tesco’s board since 2010, will be succeeded as chair of the committee by fellow non-executive Deanna Oppenheimer on 1 January but will remain on the board.

Tesco’s board is undergoing upheaval in the wake of the appointment of chief executive Dave Lewis and the discovery of a £263m profits black hole, a matter now being investigated by the Serious Fraud Office.

A replacement is being sought for Sir Richard Broadbent, the chairman, while audit committee chairman Ken Hanna and senior independent director Patrick Cescau are also expected to step down next year.

Meanwhile, Richard Cousins, the head of giant catering group Compass, and Mikael Ohlsson, a former boss of Ikea, have recently joined the retailer.

not that either are in the vicinity (no idea where the nearest might be), but i would perhaps use Lidl or Aldi for basic household goods, but wouldn't go near them for foodstuffs unless the quality was up to snuff

interestingly, our local sainsbury's correctly determined that locals went to waitrose for their vegetables because of the quality
this area was therefore specifically targeted and most successfully too, and there has been huge increase in the quality and variety offered including a wide range of organic produce

sadly, sainsbury's bread is vile, and i wouldn't buy meat or fish there ..... as and when we need some supermarket chicken, i would go to waitrose or even m&s where the (organic) quality is head and shoulders better

Asda boss chief exec Andy Clarke into days Sun.

The growth of discount stores like Aldi could put traditional household names out of business . He warned Aldi and Lidle will grow their market share in 2015 and there will be winners and losers.Mr Clarke said that the level of profitability decline in some retailers over the course of 2014 - we have never seen it before. City analysts warned that Tesco, sains and Morrisons a playing a dangerous game by positioning themselves in the middle of the market. They are being undercut by discounters while at the same time unable to charge the high prices at stores like Waitrose.

Turkeys coming home to roost at supermarkets

By John Harrington

January 02 2015, 9:20am
No one is expecting the Christmas and New Year trading period to have magically cured all of the sector's ills



The first full week of 2015 sees a spate of trading updates from retailers, with none more keenly awaited than the one from Tesco.

The update covers the run-up to Christmas plus the New Year holiday period, but just as importantly the company plans to share more detail about the measures it plans to take to improve the competitiveness of its UK stores and to strengthen the balance sheet.

Assuming we can trust the figures from Tesco (LON:TSCO) - not necessarily a safe bet in the light of events last year - the company said on December 9 that it expects full-year profits will not exceed £1.4bn.

That came as a shock to the market as, disastrous though trading was last year for the UK's biggest supermarket, analysts who cover the stock had expected it to post trading profit for the year to the end of February 2014 of between £1.7bn and £2.2bn.

It therefore goes without saying that another profit warning would not go down well with the City, and while the supermarket chain has become more accident prone than Frank Spencer, there was a little bit of encouragement last month for Tesco from consumer research firm Kantar Worldpanel, which said Tesco saw a 2.7% year-on-year fall in sales in the 12 weeks to 7 December - its least bad trading performance since June.

The relatively recent phenomenon of "national discount day" - otherwise known as Black Friday - helped put a bit of spark into sales figures durign the period.

Nonetheless, Tesco's market share has tumbled to 29.1% from 29.9% at the start of 2014; that's still an amazingly strong position but the trend is worrying, as the company flounders in its attempts to fend off the hard discounters below and the posh nosh peddlers from above.

The view in the City is that the company will need cash to see it through a prolonged period of regeneration.

New boss "Drastic" Dave Lewis is expected to sell off parts of the business, such as Tesco Bank and its analytics business Dunnhumby.

Others are bracing themselves for a rights issue of around £3bn or so, to cut its debt mountain which, at the time of the last results, was £7.5bn.

In common with the other supermarkets, Tesco is seeing the resale value of its property assets plunge in value as consumers abandon the "big box" edge of town outlets, and some City pundits think the company could write down the value of its retail estate by more than £1bn, following on from last year's £800mln write down.

Tesco's big day is 8 January, which is the same day as Morrisons (LON:MRW) and Marks & Spencer (LON:MKS) update the market and one day after Sainsbury's (LON:SBRY) tries to convince the market the future is orange.

We already know the general thrust of Morrisons' plans to restore its fortunes; on one level it is returning to its roots as a low price retailer - it is based in Yorkshire, after all - and taking the German discount chains Aldi and Lidl head on, while on another level it is adjusting to the digital shopping age, as it belatedly rolls out its online offering.

December's numbers from Kantar Worldpanel were not encouraging as Morrisons was the worst performer of the big chains, with sales falling by 3.2% in the three months to 7 December against 2.5% in the three months to 9 November.

Morrisons wrote down the value of its retail estate by around £700mln last March and more pain could be set to come.

Sainsbury (J), meanwhile, wrote down the value of its property portfolio by £628mln in 2014, and sooner or later the supermarkets must bite the bullet and start closing some of their bigger stores.

Big hitting US investment bank has speculated that one in five stores must go dark in order to protect profits.

Mike Coupe, the new chief executive of Sainsbury's has, in football parlance, been given a "hospital pass" by his predecessor, Justin King, who checked out just as sales went ex-growth.

Coupe admitted only 75% of its supermarkets were in the "right locations and are of the right size for our food and non-food offer".

The remaining 25% will have "under-utilised space" he said and Sainsbury's would consider concessions for 100 stores.

That is just one of Coupe's problems; in November Coupe revealed a revival plan based on £150mln of price cuts and £500mln of cost savings, and warned that like-for-like sales growth in the sector is likely to be negative for the next few years.

That just about sums up the picture for the grocery chains. No one is expecting the Christmas and New Year trading period to have magically cured all of the sector's ills, but it seems the best that can be hoped for by shareholders is that the lifeboats are not taking on water at quite the rate they once were

INVESTMENT EXTRA: Tesco is a tough case for Dave Lewis... so what will it take to make the company investable again?



http://www.dailymail.co.uk/money/investing/article-2894752/INVESTMENT-EXTRA-Tesco-tough-case-Dave-Lewis-make-company-investable-again.html

Sharecast -


Tesco, Sainsbury's and M&S hit by Christmas blues

Sun, 04 January 2015


Tesco, Sainsbury's and M&S hit by Christmas blues


Sainsbury's, Tesco and Marks & Spencer are set to report a decline in Christmas sales this week.
The three retailers are widely expected to post disappointing festive figures, with Sainsbury's and Tesco bearing the brunt of a decline in food sales, while M&S suffered from a struggling clothing business.

On Thursday, Tesco will release a trading update in which new chief executive Dave Lewis is expected to outline plans to cut hundreds of millions of pounds of costs and sell off assets, in a bid to implement price cuts in its stores and improve its balance sheet.

Lewis could also formally announce Tesco's intention to sell off its online streaming business Blinkbox, a move which has been anticipated since he took over.

"I would be surprised if there is not a cut in capital expenditure. I don't see how you can justify spending £2.1bn a year," said Shore Capital analyst Clive Black, who added he expected Tesco to unveil a "focus on simplification" and a "material contraction of head office".

Black said that the festive season highlighted a drastic change in the habits of British shoppers, who no longer seem to favour shopping at superstores.

"Five or six years ago people queued to get into superstore car parks. Those days are gone. For some people they are a glorified top-up shop," Black said.

According to a Deutsche Bank estimate, Tesco is expected to post a 5% drop in like-for-like sales in the three months to 30 November, a slight improvement from a 5.4% decline in the last quarter, with a drop of 4.3% for the period since then.

However, Black believes the retailer could fare better and has forecast a drop in like-for-like sales of between 2% and 2.5% for the Christmas period, slightly worse than Sainsbury's, which is expected to post a 1.8% drop in like-for-like sales.

Meanwhile, M&S is expected to report a 0.9% increase in like-for-like food sales during the Christmas period but its like-for-like sales in the general merchandise division are expected to be down 3%.

I guess all Supermarkets vary by area.
My Tescos ( large supermarket) has gone so far downhill its unbeleivable....eg
No baskets available a lot of the time
Products not priced up correctly ...and if at all
Bags For Life unavailable for months
and on and on
Having referred to the 'How Did We Do' and complained, they rarely replied and if they did the attitude was 'Thats the way it is'
Eventually giving me 100 Clubcard points to shut up

My local Aldi is good apart from fresh produce which is not dated and frequently goes off in 24 hrs and so you wonder how fresh it was. E- mailed them to ask why they don't address this and never even got a reply
Choice is also rather limited

They say if you have a good experience anywhere then its worth considering for investment. I predicted a fall for Tesco to friends about 9 months ago, but did not expect it be the way it happened.

I guess you pays your money and takes your choice