Emerging-market retailers will this year compete with established international chains in their home countries, while some will simultaneously enter developed nations, a report by Deloitte Touche Tohmatsu said yesterday.
Wal-Mart Stores Inc, Carrefour SA and other global sellers of such items as food, clothing and electronics, may face increasing challenges in developing markets as indigenous chains become more sophisticated, Ira Kalish, Los Angeles-based director of global economics at Deloitte Research and the report’s author, said in a telephone interview on Friday.
Local companies such as Cia. Brasileira de Distribuicao Grupo Pao de Acucar, Brazil’s biggest retailer, “know the markets better,” Kalish said. “They have better access to good suppliers and good properties.”
They have, said Kalish, “an advantageous situation.”
Large chain stores in China and India are also acquiring skilled, management-level staff from developed companies, eroding that global competitive advantage, he said.
Local retailers, while gaining share in their home markets, may this year begin investing in more affluent countries. Specialty stores promoting single brands are more likely to succeed, Kalish said.
“If a retailer from an emerging country becomes a global success, it will be because of something unique, and that uniqueness usually comes in the soft-goods arena,” including shoes and cosmetics, he said.
The globalization of US specialty retailers is also “imminent,” Kalish said during a presentation at a National Retail Federation conference in New York on Sunday.
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