Introduction
In a recent article by Gondola, Jumbo disclosed plans to have 50 Jumbo stores opening in Belgium by the end of 2025. In light of this news, we analysed the visits in 6 newly opened stores in 2023 and looked at which competitors lost the most visit share to the new entrant. Let’s see which supermarkets are more vulnerable to the rising star in Belgian food retail.
What's Jumbo's Strategy?
In this analysis we divided the Belgian retailers into these 2 groups: The price-conscious group, and the rest, or other group. Interestingly, Jumbo has chosen 6 locations close to competitors inside the price-conscious segment. These are stores like Albert Heijn, Lidl, Aldi, and Colruyt. When we expand the radius of our search by just a kilometre from each store, a lot of other retailers like Carrefour, Delhaize, Spar, and Okay start popping up. This could mean that Jumbo is aggressively targeting the price-conscious segment as a part of a larger strategy. To illustrate this, we plotted the 2 closest competitors of each new Jumbo store and divided them in the 2 aforementioned categories.
Jumbo Belgium's Market Impact
While we can’t say for sure that the locations of the new Jumbo stores are part of an intentional strategy, we can see the impact they had on the local markets. To analyse this, we aggregated the 6 local markets around each store and compared the months before and after the opening. These local markets are comprised of the 10 closest competitors around each new Jumbo store.
Absolute Visitor Shift
There’s a clear shift in visits from these 60 stores to the new Jumbo locations when comparing before and after the new store opening. Between months 2-4, the 6 new Jumbo stores accumulate 15.6% local visit share that mainly comes from the price-conscious stores, and to a lesser degree from the rest. Roughly two thirds of the visits to a new Jumbo store come from the budget stores on average, while only a third comes from the rest group. Price-conscious stores roughly lose 10 percentage points of local visit share, whereas the other stores lose only 6.
Slow but Steady Growth
Jumbo’s aggregated local visit share slowly but gradually improves over the following months at 16.4% only 8 months after opening. According to the CEO of Jumbo, most Belgians are fairly loyal to their supermarkets, which explains why these Jumbo stores are slowly, but steadily growing their visit share in the long run. However, the fact that they draw 16.4% of the local visit share on average after only 8 months, seems very promising for the Dutch retailer.
Relative Visitor Shift
A keen observer might notice that the relative loss of visit share during the reference for the two segments is actually very similar. The rest group relatively loses most in months 2-4 compared to the reference. The price-conscious retailers relatively lose the most in months 6-8 compared to the reference period. This might indicate that the value proposition of Jumbo with its low prices is slowly getting through to the Belgian consumers. In any case, there are stores in both segments that are clearly impacted more than others. To find out which individual chain stores are losing most of their visits to the Jumbo stores, contact us. This part of the analysis is for customers only.
Conclusion
In conclusion we can state that Jumbo is making good progress in the Belgian market after opening. On average they have a local visit share of 16% for the 6 analysed stores 8 months after opening. They seem to mainly be locating their new stores near price-conscious shops, but so far there doesn’t seem to be a strong relative pull from the one segment versus the other. In absolute terms, the price-conscious stores lose most visits. Some stores lose more than others, with the biggest negative results still sitting in the price-conscious segment. However, we reserve this information for our client base in an analysis on a more granular level. Would you like to know more about our work? Feel free to contact us.
Sources: Gondola - Jumbo sluit winkels in Wallonië op langere termijn niet uit