($) Louis Vuitton’s Formula for World Domination. “Even as it took steps to broaden its appeal, the brand put in place measures to manage the risks associated with becoming too widespread and easy to get. Its number of stores has changed little over the past 10 years, closing some as it opens others. Vuitton doesn’t sell through wholesalers and it doesn’t license its designs. There are no end-of-season sales. Its perfume production is limited to small batches, available only at Louis Vuitton retailers and on the brand’s website. Its fragrances aren’t available in the LVMH-owned retailer Sephora. Louis Vuitton has also intentionally limited supply to retain a sense of exclusivity. The brand makes small production runs for products in each collection. The idea is to always make slightly less than demand.“
($) Goldman Sachs Steps Back From Bidding for New Credit Card Programs. The move to scale back consumer credit card ambitions of Goldman Sachs is surprising to me. First, they abandoned plans to have Goldman-Sachs-branded credit cards. Then, they don’t bid for co-branded portfolios. The infrastructure that they built for Apple Card (which I suspect involves a lot of concessions) only makes sense economically if it’s used for many other portfolios. I can understand if the bank is being more conservative now than it used to be, but this type of retreat seems like an over-correction at best or at worst the beginning of the end for consumer banking ambition.
Inside Flipkart, the Indian giant beating Amazon. “Krishnamurthy had a simple approach for the sale: Go all-in on smartphones. The company offered customers interest-free loans and Krishnamurthy personally visited the offices of phone brands to make exclusive sales deals. One Flipkart executive who worked with him at the time recalled him pleading with a phone manufacturer, “Give me a chance.” His strategy worked. In terms of gross merchandise value (GMV) — the total value of goods sold — Flipkart achieved a 50% market share during the sale, compared to Amazon’s 32%, according to market research firm RedSeer. Amazon was rattled. One former executive in Amazon’s payments unit told Rest of World that within the company, some leaders still regard this period as a missed opportunity to kill off Flipkart.”
Other stuff I find interesting
($) For Remote Workers, These U.S. Cities Are Great Places to Live. I am more of an office or hybrid guy myself as I believe in the value of separating work from home as well as human interaction in an office. But if remote working is your thing, this list can be valuable. I’d throw the city of Omaha to the mix as well.
Milled is a great tool to search for email newsletters by brands
The maze is in the mouse. While there are some criticisms over parts of the article, the consensus is that it reflects the culture and inner workings at Google. As a result, Google has a big problem at hand. Given the hiring frenzy, the layoff and the botched launch of Bard, one must wonder if Sundar is the right man to help Google fix these problems and once again roar in the future.
Why cash is still king in Iraq. It makes one reflect on how much banking regulations in the US protect consumers and create trust. And how often we tend to take it for granted.
Why African EV startups are struggling. “Two years on, however, industry advocates believe the company’s goals are too ambitious given the high EV prices, unfriendly government policies, lack of charging infrastructure, high customs duties, and bad roads in African countries.”
($) Americans Are Gobbling Up Takeout Food. Restaurants Bet That Won’t Change. Quite an interesting trend in the restaurant industry. I have no idea how it will go because my personal experience is conflicted. My wife and I are often marveled at the long line in front of every Chick-fil-A store that we pass by. On the other hand, I saw fast food stores with no line, no car in the parking slot and very few diners. Takeout may increase sales for restaurants, as long as they survive
Aldi, H-E-B among growth leaders in 2022: Report. “Small-format stores are cheaper to build and require less land or space to buy or lease. This allows access to more markets than a larger-format store would. Furthermore, as retailers continue to invest heavily in e-commerce, these smaller stores can act as fulfillment centers for online orders.”
($) Bed Bath & Beyond Used to Be Great. These Two Are Why. Bed Bath & Beyond’s founders serve as an example of honesty, authenticity, frugality and customer orientation. They are not afraid to admit their own mistake, including not realizing the potential of the Internet. At first, when the company’s budget was tiny, the two men used cardboard boxes as trash bins and still make sure both sides of scrap paper are used. I also found it awesome that they finally learned to let go of their creation after being pushed out.
($) Japan, Netherlands Agree to Limit Exports of Chip-Making Equipment to China. A great triumph for the Biden administration in hampering China’s ambition in this critical area. Without the most advanced materials and technologies from ASML, Nikon and other important manufacturers, China won’t be able to scale their semiconductor operations and bridge the gap to the US
The highest rail route in northern Europe. “Connecting Norway’s stylish capital with its most picturesque city, the 496km, 39-station Oslo-Bergen railway is one of the world’s most beautiful train journeys.”
Instacart Offers Grocers the Future of Grocery in a Bundle. Instacart becomes a much more interesting company with these innovations. Pushing a heavy cart around and waiting in line forever just to check out is not a great customer experience. The Caper Cart sounds like a game changer for grocers, shoppers and Instacart. These products are so different economically than delivery services. This helps diversifying Instagram, adding revenue stream and reducing risks.
What Chinese media reveals about Shein’s secretive operations. “There are two main kinds of suppliers: “free on board,” those that make simple designs they haven’t devised themselves, and “original design manufacturers,” those that do both. They all feed into Shein’s sprawling manufacturing execution system (MES). The designer-suppliers will find pictures online and send a selection to Shein’s internal buyers for consideration; the buyer and their manager settle on a final pool. Once samples have been received, there might be two, or even three, rounds of changes before manufacturing can commence. (The entire time, everything needs to be recorded in the MES — materials, pricing, even chat logs — something suppliers balk at, because, if the deal falls through, all the information sits in Shein’s records, and there’s nothing to stop them from producing it elsewhere.). hein is ruthlessly efficient when it comes to evaluating its suppliers, according to analysis by Zhongtai Securities. A scoring system sorts the wheat from the chaff. Timeliness of procurement and delivery, stocking and delivery, rate of defects, and the success rate of new products make up 40% of a supplier’s score. The remaining 60% is based on order volume. They are then tiered into five levels, and the bottom 30% of the lowest tier are culled.”
The Ascendancy of Ahold Delhaize. “Ahold Delhaize USA has been strengthening its position as it looks to take its hyper-local value proposition national. After blockbuster revenue years in 2020 and 2021, Ahold Delhaize has demonstrated that it can keep growing by focusing on omnichannel innovation, prioritizing value and expanding its assortment of high-quality, low-cost private-brand products. “
($) The Unstoppable Rise of Aldi in Britain Shows No Sign of Slowing. “A recent visit to Purley, south London, found the parking lot outside Aldi boasting BMWs, Land Rovers and Porsches and shoppers choosing Aldi over nearby branches of Lidl and Sainsbury, as well as the upmarket Waitrose 10 minutes away. An extra 1.5 million customers have visited Aldi over the past three months. When sales were up by at most the low single digits at most UK supermarkets, they rose 19% at Aldi and 20.9% at Lidl. Part of the strategy is economy of scale. Aldi has about 2,000 key products in store, compared with as many as 30,000 in some large rival supermarkets. By stocking just one ketchup, for example, Aldi has a tight supply chain and can avoid pricing rows like Tesco’s recent spats with Kraft Heinz Co. and Mars Inc.“
Why the Rush to Mine Lithium Could Dry Up the High Andes. “With the world’s car fleets transitioning to electric propulsion, Argentina, with reserves of up to 60 million metric tons, according to government estimates, is well-positioned to profit from the lithium rush. Lax regulation and low taxes make its part of the Lithium Triangle — in the northwestern provinces of Jujuy, Salta, and Catamarca — “especially attractive for foreign investors,” according to Lucas Gonzalez of the National Scientific and Technical Research Council (CONICET), a government agency in Buenos Aires. The country could soon become the world’s second-largest lithium producer, after Australia, and the largest producer from evaporative mining. But every ton of lithium carbonate extracted from underground using this cheap, low-tech method typically dissipates into the air about half a million gallons of water that is vital to the arid high Andes. The extraction lowers water tables, and because freshwater often sits on top of salty water, this has the potential to dry up the lakes, wetlands, springs, and rivers that flourish where the underground water reaches the surface.“
iPhone 14 Pro Review: No phone is an island. I like Jason’s review of iPhone 14 Pro. A few friends of mine belittled Apple for the lack of innovation. I mean, that criticism is fair when it comes to the lower lineup iPhone 14, but the Pro version is much further ahead with a lot of cool features and innovation. It’s also great financially for Apple, to sell more expensive and higher margin phones, especially when there is shortage of components.
How Apple Pay works under the hood? An example of how complex payments are under the hood and how far technology has come to enable such complexity in mere seconds
I was always wondering what's the difference between Apple Pay and Google Pay.
Now I know: Google knows about every f*cking payment you make, while Apple doesn't.
What is Decoupling? In an insightful working paper, Thales Teixeira and Peter Jamieson described Decoupling as “the separation of two or more activities ordinarily done in conjunction by consumers”. The separation’s purpose is to increase value for consumers by focusing on the value-creating activity while reducing exposure to the value-capturing or value-destroying one.
Breaking down a business’ success or failure is not a straightforward exercise. There are so many factors at play. The same goes for disruption. However, I believe Decoupling offers a simply yet powerful tool to analyze business strategies and disruption.
Below are a few examples of how I use Decoupling to look at companies:
Uber: consumers have a transportation need to go from A to B. That’s the value-creating piece. However, before Uber, there were several non-value-creating activities. If someone wanted to drive themselves, they had to physically and mentally stay alert for some time and look for a parking slot. If riders used a taxi, they had to somehow manage to get a cab and in some cases, suffer from an unhygienic car/driver. Uber decoupled the act of going from A to B in a comfortable manner from all other noises by providing consumers a way to book a decent car with just a few taps on a phone and a driver that is already vetted.
Aldi: at grocery stores, consumers want to buy groceries that they deem worth their money & time. That’s the value consumers need. Some stores; however, sell many more items, stack different variations for one item (cereal, milk or ground coffee, for example) and, as a consequence, have bigger stores that take time for consumers to navigate. Aldi competes and, dare I say, wins over consumers by focusing on selling good groceries on the cheap by 1/ leveraging private labels which are cheaper than national brands; 2/ eliminating activities like market research, advertising or unnecessary expenses; 3/ keeping their stores small and just acceptably decorated. They decouple affordable groceries from everything that threatens to increase costs.
Venmo/CashApp/PayPal: Consumers always need to send money to and receive money from other folks as quickly, cheaply and seamlessly as possible. Before the likes of Venmo, CashApp or PayPal, it was either cash on hand which necessitated an actual time-consuming meet or a check which took some time to settle. These apps decoupled the money exchange activity from the time wasters. Consumers can exchange money in almost real time.
AWS: every company needs IT infrastructure to operate and compete in this day and age. What they don’t need is to go out, scrap all the components, stand up an IT stack and maintain it over time, including hardware replacement and software update. AWS decouples the use of IT resources from the act of acquiring and maintaining it. Because of AWS, startups can get going quickly without saddling themselves in high expenses while big companies can leverage the cloud and scale down IT workforce.
AirBnb: ordinary hosts that don’t operate a resort or hotel have three essential activities: hosting, finding guests and verifying that such guests are trustworthy enough to let into their homes. Guests, on the other hand, have to travel and find a place where they can feel safe. AirBnb functions as the decoupler that allows hosts to focus on hosting and guests to focus on traveling. The brand name of AirBnb and the network effect bring one party to the other. Their review mechanism fosters the trust in the ecosystem.
TSMC: the production of computer chips involves design, manufacturing and assembly of chips. Each step requires different expertise and cost structure. Semiconductor shops in the past used to do everything. Then, companies like TSMC decoupled from the value chain. The Taiwan-based firm focuses on building the best fabs in the world and manufacturing chips, leaving the design and assembly to somebody else. The result is that TSMC is now the market leader in the chip manufacturing market and the indispensable player in this industry.
Decoupling works because it reduces costs for both the decouplers and consumers. From the consumer perspective, the more activities, the more costs. And I am not merely talking about monetary costs. Time spent on non-creating activities is also a significant cost. From the decoupler perspective, focusing on one link in the value chain deepens expertise, reaches economies of scale and lowers unit economics. Aldi is still one of the most affordable and best grocers out there. Remember when Uber and AirBnb used to be cheap when they had their breakthrough?
Decoupling, in my opinion, is a useful concept and powerful tool to look at businesses. Thales’ book will have more details. If you are interested in learning more, I’d recommend that you read it.
If you are looking for a strategy framework to think about a business’ competitive advantages, I recommend VRIO.
The name is an abbreviation of Valuable, Rare, Inimitable and Organized. Essentially, if a firm’s capability or resource is Valuable, Rare and Inimitable, and the firm itself is Organized, it has a sustained competitive advantage. The more sustained competitive advantages a firm has, the more robust its business model is and the more likely it is to succeed. Let’s take a look at a few real-life examples to see how applicable this framework is:
Apple is arguably the best in the world in combining hardware and software to produce great consumer products. Such a capability is absolutely valuable and rare because we don’t often see that in the market. Samsung or Huawei can make good hardware, but they don’t put hardware and software to harmonious use like Apple does. Google owns Android and is excellent at software, but they aren’t known for their hardware prowess. The fact that some of the biggest companies in the world haven’t been able to copy Apple means that this capability is hard to imitate. Plus, Apple, since Steve Jobs return, has been well-organized to leverage this capability with one P&L to promote singular objectives, the sway that the Industrial Design has or the new multi-billion dollar campus to encourage creativity and collaboration. Lately, Apple has bolstered this competitive advantage further with its own chip M1 and the rumored initiative to design its own 5G cellular chip. It’s precisely the ability to combine humanity, hardware and software that makes Apple products astounding success and itself the most valuable company (as of this writing).
Another advantage that Apple possesses is its world-class supply chain. Not many companies can operate a complex supply network that spans the world and have bargaining power over even powerful players like Foxconn, TSMC or Intel. Imagine that you have to work with suppliers in different countries for different parts, navigate through local regulations, coordinate delivery and transportation, and negotiate pricing while protecting the confidentiality of products. It’s monumentally challenging, but on the other hand, it’s valuable, rare and hard to imitate. Any new rival will have to spend years to put up the same network, and even then, it likely doesn’t have the power of Apple. Additionally, is Apple organized to leverage this capability? Tim Cook, the current CEO, is a supply chain wizard. The company COO, Jeff Williams, is also an Operations guy. The company is one of a few from the West to have a productive relationship with China and its government, despite all the political tension between the U.S and China. This type of relationship can’t be replicated in a short amount of time, if it can be replicated at all. Hence, supply chain is another sustained competitive advantage that Apple has to offer.
Aldi
Aldi is a hard-discounter chain that originates from Germany and came to the U.S in 1976. The former CEO and President of Walmart, Greg Foran, labeled Aldi as “good and fierce”. What makes Aldi so? The discounter’s sustained competitive advantage lies in its long-standing culture and commitment to cut costs and pass on savings to shoppers. Here are a few practices that Aldi employs:
On average, an Aldi store’s size is about 12,000 square feet, compared to Walmart’s 178,000 and Costco’s 145,000 square feet. The smaller size helps drive down either leasing expense (if the land is leased) or depreciation (if the land is owned), as well as energy costs. Regarding SKUs, an Aldi store, on average, carries 1,400 items compared to 40,000 items by a traditional supermarket. The much smaller store size and more limited item selection lead to fewer staff required. An Aldi store usually has only 3-5 employees, a significantly smaller number compared to how many employees are present at a store like Walmart or Costco. The limited item selection enables Aldi to focus on its offerings and negotiate favorable deals with suppliers to keep costs and prices low. Another benefit is that a limited assortment doesn’t require complex marketing promotions, meaning that there will be no cost on marketing materials and labor.
Walking into an Aldi store, you won’t notice many decorations. It looks like an ordinary, no-fancy store and it’s by design to keep costs low. At Aldi stores, there is no free bag. Customers are encouraged to bring their own bags. Carts can only be used with a quarter coin. Customers retrieve the quarter upon returning a cart. This policy has long been part of Aldi’s signature operations. Additionally, customers have to bag their own groceries. A cashier will scan items and put them in a cart, but shoppers will have to take it from there. It speeds up the checkout process, increases efficiency and reduces the need for additional staff. As far as I know, there is no self-checkout.
About 90% of Aldi’s items are private labels. This private label centric approach allows Aldi total control over its selection and reduces the cost as well as complexity that comes with national brands. Private labels used to be unpopular among shoppers due to their cheap image. However, consumer preferences have changed. Astute shoppers, especially millennials, now have a much more favorable view on private labels because they are cheap and provide best value for money. According to Bain, 85% of American shoppers are open to buying private labels.
It’s certainly valuable to pass on savings to shoppers. While the practices themselves may not be rare, the commitment and the culture that enables consistent execution are. The frugal approach that empowers all the little things mentioned above has been nurtured and well-preserved since 1946 when the parent brand was founded in Germany. The only rival that has a similar mentality is Walmart. But the two chains differ in strategies. While Walmart has its hands in numerous cookie jars, Aldi’s bread and butter in the U.S is groceries in small stores with a small number of SKUs. In that segment of the market, I don’t see anyone with Aldi’s expertise and culture. As you can notice, it’s easy to copy a tangible element or an expertise of a business, but it’s much more difficult to replicate the intangibles like culture. Lastly, is Aldi organized? The brand is still one of the best, if not the best, hard discounters in various markets. In the U.S, it has been growing steadily since 1976 and becoming more popular among shoppers. So, I’ll say: yes, it’s organized!
Disney
Disney’s competitive advantage comes from its ability to consistently create excellent content loved by millions around the world. Any production studio can come up with a great movie or show once in a while. Disney is among a handful that can do it consistently. Take Spiderman: No Way Home as an example. It’s on track to net over $240 million in the first opening weekend while being the 27th Marvel movie since Iron Man in 2008. Over the last decade, Disney has dominated the list of highest grossing movies with hit after hit like Avengers: End Game, Captain Marvel, Infinitive War, Black Panther or Star Wars: The Force Awakens. While HBO is known for its quality outputs, even the famed studio isn’t as prolific as Disney. If you think about it, it’s all but nearly impossible to achieve what Disney has done, especially given that it owns the IPs such as Star Wars and Marvel franchise for eternity. Is it guaranteed to succeed long in the future? No. But Disney is more likely than any of its rivals to replicate its previous successes.
Another competitive advantage that this iconic brand has is its theme parks. Disney’s theme parks attract thousands of visitors around the world every year. As an important source of revenue and margin for the company, and a place for fans to connect with iconic movie figures, these theme parks are certainly valuable. However, they are not easy to create. Any company can pour millions of dollars into building and operating a park, but would they have the brand equity that Disney has with consumers around the world? Would they be able to lure enough visitors to make their park a financial success? To cultivate a brand or a cult like Disney does, a challenger needs to put out iconic content and characters year after year. That in and of itself is a monumental challenge that can’t be done in a few years’ time, if it can be done at all.
In short, VRIO is by no means the only framework to evaluate a business’ strength. We also have Porter’s Five Forces or Value Chain Analysis, just to name a couple. But VRIO is a very useful tool in analyzing a business’ competitive advantages and whether the business is great at anything it does. It’s one of my go-to tools when looking at a firm, as I demonstrated above. Hope this has been helpful for you.
Today, I ran into a very awesome website called InPractise. InPractise is a treasure trove for nerds or curious minds like myself. It interviews folks, mostly former & current executives at major firms with tribal and insider knowledge as well as domain expertise, to shed light on great business insights, practices and strategies. The content is delivered in audio and text format, which I appreciate greatly as while I sometimes like to listen to interviews, taking my eyes away from the screen, I mostly consume content better by reading. For $20/month on a monthly basis or $200/year, subscribers gain access to 10+ interviews per month. If you do the maths, it comes down to $2 per interview, which is quite cheap for valuable insights. Another cool thing about InPractise is that they let you try it out for two weeks first for free without asking your credit card details.
I gave it a try today and have been spending hours reading the previous posts. I am talking about it here as a token of my appreciation to the website for letting me read their stuff for free for two weeks, even though I have every intention of becoming a subscriber already. Below are a few insights that I found very helpful
Aldi: Hard Discounter Business Model – With Former CEO of Aldi UK
Finally, as a hope, I would say, a discounter like Aldi when entering a market would prefer that its competition is stock market listed. Stock market listed companies have programs, management incentive schemes, which means that the management is not likely to react to a new threat until the last minute. They’re whole compensation package, what is expected of them as a management team, their contracts, their job descriptions are all based on maximizing shareholder value, maximizing profits.
Basically, we did everything out of those first 15 years to get ourselves what our goal was. Which is to match the quality level of the best-selling brands on the market. Now, some of that was easy. We could do it within four or five years. Some of it was dreadfully hard. You try making a KitKat even in a normal chocolate factory, which rivals a KitKat. It is really difficult to do. Either the chocolate mushes into the biscuit, or the biscuit is too hard and breaks your teeth. So on. It was really a journey to end up with a thousand products, which truly were rivals for the best-selling brands on the market under the private labels which the company was doing. Enormous fun. I never had a corporate lunch in 25 years because every midday, I was involved in testing product to see whether or not you could tell the difference between the Aldi version of Cornflakes and Kellogg’s. Or the Aldi version of Ketchup up and Heinz. Eventually, we got there. It was truly very difficult to tell the difference. That’s when you’ve got a business concept, which the majority of consumers will not turn their noses up at.
Scale means purchasing power with an individual supplier. You can’t have hundreds of suppliers all making one product and just selling it in different places. You actually have very few to start with one, maybe two or three in the future who are producing enormous scale. If you lost one of those, it’s an absolute catastrophe. First of all, it won’t be possible for the other suppliers, even if you have a dual supply, to make up another 50 percent overnight. Secondly, you run the risk that the quality is not the same.
Thirdly, you have the situation where your reputation is put at risk with companies that would have to make serious investment decisions to be able to make your private label to the same quality as brands. We were always incredibly protective over the suppliers. Quite actually forgiving when mistakes were made, so long as they weren’t made on a constant basis. Tried to be more than fair with that supply base. What does more than fair mean? To be people who agreed things on handshakes and don’t need 50-page contracts to endorse it. Secondly, to pay on time. The biggest single question every supplier will have about its retail partner is: Am I going to get the money for the product that I’ve put all the investment into and delivered to their warehouse 15/20/25/30 days, whatever the contract actually says, later. I will tell you, you’d have got fired in Aldi if you paid one day late. A CEO would get fired if he deliberately paid one day late a supplier.
After only a few years, most Aldi management can tell you exactly how long it will take to clean a store in minutes. How long it will take to merchandise a pallet. How long it will take to unload a truck. How long it will take to process a hundred customers through the cash registers. There are prizes given for people who can invent a small change to the business process that can quicken something up even if it’s only a few seconds because that few seconds is multiplied by thousands of stores and hundreds of days per year.
The final bill for this super, little idea is often worth an astronomic amount of money in terms of cost reduction. That’s the philosophy for which the business is built on. A nice little example. If you pick up a product, I don’t have one in front of me, but if you pick up a product and you show it to a normal food retailer, he will look at the colors. He will look at the messages that the product has on it. He will look at how beautiful this item is. He’s thinking how many of those I can sell. I’ll tell you, you put this product in front of any Aldi operating manager and the first thing he’ll look at is, how big is the barcode? If that doesn’t scan with one sweep of the arm across the cash register, that’s going to cost me money. That’s just one of a thousand examples I could give you of how this cost mentality is built in from day one.
Netflix Business Model & Economics – With Former Director of Financial Planning and Analysis at Netflix
I’ll take the other side of it. I don’t think they want to move into it, nor do they need to for growth. I think to further saturate the US, they would probably move into news and sports more aggressively. They are growing just fine in the US and are growing even better internationally, so I don’t think they have to. I think they would do that as a distraction tax for a few reasons. If they were to move into news and sports, live is largely supported by advertising. Advertisers pay a premium and people don’t skip the commercials as much. Do they want to go out and build an ads sales force of hundreds and thousands of employees, insertion of dynamic ads, data which Facebook and Google have been collecting for years to do this at scale? It is beyond their focus right now, especially when they have this massive opportunity to take what they’ve already done and port that over to new countries with different content. They’re dabbling with news and sports and reality and other categories and they’ll push those. But you’ll see non-scripted, the reality competition shows they’re doing, before news and sports. Sports is extremely challenged and maybe that will shake out over the next three years, but I don’t see it as a near term focus.
On the question of whether Netflix should move into sports. Source: InPractise
The real question, if you look at more of a five-year view, is do they have pricing power domestically? I absolutely believe they do. They’re going to continue to accelerate their spend, the number of shows and categories such as unscripted theatrical movies they are investing in. I think that will, eventually, result in what Disney is now doing. Disney is experimenting with bringing a $30 super premium movie, like Mulan, which was supposed to go to theaters, and bringing it onto Disney Plus and expecting consumers to pay a regular subscription fee, plus $30 on top. Netflix would take that same movie, that is maybe on a par with Mulan or The Irishman, and give it to users for free.
Eventually, they are going to say, you are getting these movies at Disney – who are charging you $20 to $30 – so we are going to increase our price from $13 to $15. They are still not the price leader, as they are behind HBO Max which is $15. Netflix has a $15 price but its average user is not there, as they are on a lower tier. They have a chance to move people up those price tiers, but I don’t foresee that happening in the near term. They have that option when they choose to exercise it and I expect them to exercise it very diligently and thoughtfully.
Lidl in Ireland: from 0 to 12% market share in 20 years – With Former Head of Sales Organisation, Lidl Ireland
It is very difficult to give a percentage on that because it is a changing product group. Some items are discontinued and some are coming in, so every day or every week that changes, but probably around 10% to 15% as a rough guide. When you look at the shelf. you have your top shelf, middle shelf and bottom shelf. Sometimes there are four or five shelves, but the own brand will always be at eye level, first in flow. The brand will be on a shelf but always hidden. It might even be on the floor. I remember Nescafe coffee never ever made it off ankle height, but there’s a reason for that, that was always to promote the own brand and give it the best possible chance.
“They are fierce and they are good.” – The then-President and CEO of Walmart US, Greg Foran, said this about Aldi, a hard discounter hailing from Germany.
A little bit of history. The original Aldi was founded in 1946 by Karl and Theo Albrecht in Essen, Germany. The name Aldi combines the first two characters of their last name (“Al”) and the first two characters of the word Discount (“Di”). The company was split about 2 decades later into Aldi Nord and Aldi Sud when the founding brothers disagreed over the sale of cigarettes in their stores. Aldi Sud made inroads into the US grocery market first in 1976, keeping the brand name. Aldi Nord followed through the acquisition of Trader Joe’s. Although Aldi isn’t a household name like Costco, Walmart or Target in the US, the chain has been in the US, actually, for quite some time with the first store opened in Iowa in 1976.
How has Aldi been doing in the US?
By the latest estimate, Aldi has about 2,000 stores in the US. In 2017, the chain announced a $5.3 billion expansion plan that is focused on remodeling existing stores and opening new ones. Aldi expects to have 2,500 stores in the US by 2022, making it the 3rd largest grocery chain only behind Kroger and Walmart.
Aldi was reported to have a tad over 2% of market share in the US grocery segment in 2018. Morgan Stanley estimated that in 2019, Aldi’s YoY growth surpassed that of Kroger, Target, Whole Foods, Publix and only trailed behind that of Walmart. Supermarket News said that the German-native discounter recorded about $18.4 billion in revenue in 2018, up from $16.8 a year prior. Since the company is privately held and does not have to report its financial data, these figures cannot be confirmed for 100% accuracy. In an interview in 2018, the CEO of Aldi revealed that the company’s US sales doubled in the previous 5 years leading to 2018 and added that “our same-store sales over the past several years has been much more than the industry has realized.”
In the same interview, the CEO, Jason Hart, said that in 2017, 40 million households shopped at their stores every month with 7 new million households added to the customer base. Aldi expects the figure to grow to 100 million customers every month by the end of 2022.
Apparently, shoppers love Aldi. According to the study by Bain & Company in 2018, a known consulting firm, Aldi leads all discounters in Net Promoter Score, which is a metric for customer advocacy, and is a top 3 in the grocery segment overall. A high Net Promoter Score is important as promoters are much more loyal and spend more. Per Bain, “promoters in general spend much more—$111 vs. $39 on average per month—and give retailers a higher “share of wallet”—28% for promoters vs. 11% for detractors”. A study by Morgan Stanley revealed that in 2018, 19% of shoppers who switched retailers began shopping at Aldi, second only to Walmart. Walmart got 30% of switchers, but the figure was flat from a year prior while Aldi’s number increased.
Given what we have seen so far, Aldi has done quite well for themselves in the cut-throat grocery market. What is their secret sauce?
What makes Aldi competitive?
Aldi is known for its thrifty culture and approach. The company works aggressively in cutting costs and passing on savings to shoppers as much as possible. On average, an Aldi store’s size is about 12,000 square feet, compared to Walmart’s 178,000 and Costco’s 145,000 square feet. The smaller size helps drive down either leasing expense (if the land is leased) or depreciation (if the land is owned), as well as energy costs. Regarding SKUs, an Aldi store, on average, carries 1,400 items compared to 40,000 items by a traditional supermarket. The much smaller store size and more limited item selection lead to fewer staff required. An Aldi store usually has only 3-5 employees, a significantly smaller number compared to how many employees are present at a store like Walmart or Costco. The limited item selection enables Aldi to focus on its offerings and negotiate favorable deals with suppliers to keep costs and prices low. Another benefit is that a limited assortment doesn’t require complex marketing promotions, meaning that there will be no cost on marketing materials and labor.
The way Aldi operates its stores also contributes to cost savings and lower prices. Walking into an Aldi store, you won’t notice many decorations. It looks like an ordinary, no-fancy store and it’s by design to keep costs low. At Aldi stores, there is no free bag. Customers are encouraged to bring their own bags. Carts can only be used with a quarter coin. Customers retrieve the quarter upon returning a cart. This policy has long been part of Aldi’s signature operations. Additionally, customers have to bag their own groceries. A cashier will scan items and put them in a cart, but shoppers will have to take it from there. It speeds up the checkout process, increases efficiency and reduces the need for additional staff. As far as I know, there is no self-checkout.
The book Retail Disruptors mentioned the thrifty approach codified into what is known as Aldi’s “Doing Without Checklist”. The checklist consists of rules such as “no external market research, no customer surveys, no budget forecasts, no public appearances, no publicity, no PR departments, no sumptuous business offices, no company cars, no gifts accepted or invitations for dinners from vendors.” If you are not familiar with Aldi, perhaps this may be the reason why.
For example, each product has a bar code on each side of its package so cashiers can scan items quickly. The company recently took two years to develop a new milk bottle and transporting system that swapped out metal for polystyrene crates, allowing it to get more milk on a single truck because it weighs less, which saves on transport costs.
About 90% of Aldi’s items are private labels. This private label centric approach allows Aldi total control over its selection and reduces the cost as well as complexity that comes with national brands. Private labels used to be unpopular among shoppers due to their cheap image. However, consumer preferences have changed. Astute shoppers, especially millennials, now have a much more favorable view on private labels because they are cheap and provide best value for money. According to Bain, 85% of American shoppers are open to buying private labels.
All together, Aldi’s culture and operational philosophy lead to lower prices and value for money for shoppers, especially in fresh groceries and staples. I switched to Aldi from Walmart a few months ago. My shopping habit is pretty consistent as I only need a few vegetables, some nuts milk and fruits, all of which can be found for a cheap price at Aldi. For instance, I have bought a lot of fresh grapes for 79 cents per pound for the past 4 weeks, a price much lower that what other grocers can offer. A bottle of soy or almond milk costs only around $2.4 at Aldi.
Of course, Aldi isn’t for everyone. There are a lot of things unavailable at Aldi and so are other convenient add-ons. If you want to buy a TV or an appliance or want a self-checkout, chances are that you won’t find either at Aldi. However, if you only want to buy fresh produces and staple food consistently at cheap prices without having to deal with complexity that comes with various choices, then Aldi is for you. Also, not many people enjoy spending a lot of time at a store. Personally, I can go in and out of an Aldi in about 5 minutes, if in-store traffic is light. I know what I want to buy and the store’s 5-aisle layout makes it super easy to navigate. In fact, Aldi seems to resonate well with high earners. Aldi’s new stores are in zip codes that have more than $65,800 household income on average, about $4,500 above the national average.
Grocers in the US certainly noticed the German brand’s presence. Since 2017, Walmart has closed the price gap to Aldi. Retailers also invested heavily in eCommerce and delivery options such as pickup or to-door delivery. Aldi responded by:
Increasing its fresh food offerings by 40% in 2018 and adding new vegan and vegetarian options
Launching a nationwide marketing campaign, something that is unusual for the discounter
Introducing a partnership with Instacart for pickup and delivery
The company has performed well so far in the US. It’s expanding and has its own legion of fans, including myself. However, that’s not a guarantee for future success. The grocery market is notoriously low-margin and littered with aggressive competitors who have vast resources at their disposal. Also, changing customer preferences can go against Aldi. Case in point: Covid-19 has driven consumers to shop online more, even for groceries. If Aldi is forced to steer away from its bare-bone approach, it will eat away the discounter margin, but Aldi may not have a choice. There are several ways that Aldi can unlock growth that I can think of:
Expanding geographically to new market, especially into West Coast
Adding more convenient services
Expanding its item selection. Since it doesn’t carry too many items, there is a lot of opportunity here
Going after more affluent customers who value what Aldi has to offer
I am excited to see what the future holds for Aldi. I don’t know how it will go for the discounter. Given my personal experience as a shopper and the company’s performance after being in the US since 1976, I think it earns a bit of our confidence.
For the past two months, I lost interest in picking up a book for some reason. Nonetheless, the streak ended today as I finished this book.
The book offers a detailed and insightful view on hard discounters which usually act as disruptors in a local retail market. The book defines hard discounters as follows:
Hard-discount retailers offer basic goods and daily necessities at the lowest possible prices, while maintaining high-quality standards. A hard-discounter store differs from discount supermarkets or hypermarkets like Asda, Kaufland, or Walmart. Hard-discount stores are typically about 8,000-15,000 square feet, less than one-tenth the size of a Walmart Supercenter, with probably lower staffing levels.
To reduce costs, hard discounters often display items on shipping pallets and in the boxes in which they arrive. The store is minimally decorated and offers a limited assortment of consumer packaged goods and perishables – typically less than 2,000 stock-keeping units (SKUs). In contrast, the average US supermarket carried 40,000 to 50,000 SKUs in 2017, while a Walmart Supercenter sells over 100,000 grocery and non-grocery items.
Here is what I learned from it
Beware of potential threats in the market. The book told stories of retailers around the world that paid the price for under-estimating hard discounters. They dismissed the arrival of hard discounters at first and when they realized the threat was real, it was already too late to stop the hard discounters.
Benefits of offering a limited assortment of SKUs. I am usually overwhelmed by a plethora of choices at restaurants or supermarkets. As the book says, to shoppers who are under time pressure or who intend to buy rather than browse, a better shopping experience is to be offered streamlined options or a limited range of choices. Plus, retailers who sell a limited assortment, especially private labels, can negotiate a better economic deal with suppliers due to economies of scale. A better deal will help the margin of hard discounters. Additionally, a limited assortment of goods means smaller stores – lower rent, saved costs on logistics and staff.
Go-to-market strategy. Hard discounters tend to enter a new country through a specific market first. Get the foot in, the logistics and operations in and then expand. Also, each go-to-market strategy varies from one country to another due to a host of factors such as household income per capita, economic growth, shopping preferences. Blindly adapting a blanket strategy to different markets may lead to failures.
The book offers a comprehensive view on different aspects of hard discounters and retail in general. It confirmed my belief that a competing strategy can be made up of so many factors that are intertwined together, including to not limited to:
The size of assortments
Whether a retailer carries more private labels or national labels
How man perishable items a retailer carries
Whether it has a good brand name
Whether it has economies of scale
Whether the shopping preferences of local shoppers are a good fit
How much a retailer spends on marketing, promotions and discounts; and for how long it can sustain the effort.
A retailer’s culture
After penetrating a market, whether a retailer can survive the competition depends on the retailer’s ability to carve out a niche in the market where it can be competitive, using a combination of the above factors or more.
A few notable stats
Private labels account for somewhere between 70-90% of hard discounters’ assortment
In 2017, middle-class shoppers in the UK account for 60% of shoppers at Aldi and Lidl
In Germany, hard discounters accounted for three out of every ten euros spent on grocery purchases or 60 billion euros in 2017
Aldi entered Australia in 2001, and by 2017, had cost conventional retailers like Woolworths and Coles AU $16 billion in lost annual revenues
Trader Joe’s offers around 3,500 different items, Lidl between 1,500 and 2,000 while Aldi carries between 1,200 and 1,400 products
In Germany, Lidle was the largest advertiser among grocery retailers in 2017 (almost 280 million euros) and the sixth-largest advertiser in the country ahead of McDonald’s, Daimler, Unilever and Samsung
Trader Joe’s sales per square foot is $1,633, twice that of Aldi and Lidl, four times that of a Walmart supercenter and 8 times that of Dollar General
In Australia, 26% of Aldi shoppers were from high-income families in 2006. The figure shot up to 50% in 2014
For the average US grocery retailer, a loss of 1% in sales leads to a loss of 17% in operating profit
Minh Quang Duong 