Market share narrows between Coles and Woolworths, while ALDI makes important gains
ALDI supermarkets continue to go from strength to strength, quadrupling their customer base over the last eight years from under a million to 4.2 million people shopping there in an average four-week period. While this falls a long way short of the 8.8 million customers shopping at Coles or the 9.5 million at Woolworths, ALDI’s long-term gains in terms of market share indicate that the European supermarket chain is on the up and up.
As of December 2013, Roy Morgan’s Supermarket Currency report placed ALDI in the Top 3 of supermarkets in terms of market share. Accounting for 10.3% of all grocery dollars, ALDI surpassed even IGA (9.5%). At 39.0%, Woolworths still maintains the largest slice of the pie, while Coles continued to improve, achieving its highest market-share proportion since March 2008 at 33.5%.
Proportion of all grocery dollars spent at each supermarket
Source: Roy Morgan Single Source (Australia), January 2005 - December 2013, latest 12 months to December 2013 n= 14,006. Base: Grocery Buyers 14+
Warren Reid, Group Account Manager – Consumer Products, Roy Morgan Research, says:
“Despite the long-standing dominance of Coles and Woolworths, ALDI have shown that it’s not a two-horse race. More importantly, ALDI’s popularity also suggests that there are opportunities for other international supermarket giants to successfully enter the Australian grocery market.
“While ALDI’s increase in market share over the last eight years may seem like a slow burn, they’ve actually secured a sizeable chunk of the $82 billion grocery market. It’s not that Metcash/ IGA are any less important to consider, but they haven’t made the same kind of gains over the last few years.
“Despite Woolworths posting above-average sales in their latest quarter, this hasn’t had any noticeable impact on their market share, as Coles continues to close the gap, and ALDI continues to grow.”
For comments or more information please contact:
Warren Reid, Group Account Manager — Consumer Products
Office: +61 (3) 9224 5161
warren.reid@roymorgan.com
Related Research
View our extensive range of Retail profiles across a range of categories, including Supermarket currency reports, ALDI customer profile, and Coles customer profile. These profiles provide a broad understanding of the target audience, in terms of demographics, attitudes, activities and media usage in Australia.
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Margin of Error
The margin of error to be allowed for in any estimate depends mainly on the number of interviews on which it is based. Margin of error gives indications of the likely range within which estimates would be 95% likely to fall, expressed as the number of percentage points above or below the actual estimate. Allowance for design effects (such as stratification and weighting) should be made as appropriate.
| Sample Size | Percentage Estimate |
| 40% – 60% | 25% or 75% | 10% or 90% | 5% or 95% | |
| 1,000 | ±3.0 | ±2.7 | ±1.9 | ±1.3 |
| 5,000 | ±1.4 | ±1.2 | ±0.8 | ±0.6 |
| 7,500 | ±1.1 | ±1.0 | ±0.7 | ±0.5 |
| 10,000 | ±1.0 | ±0.9 | ±0.6 | ±0.4 |
| 20,000 | ±0.7 | ±0.6 | ±0.4 | ±0.3 |
| 50,000 | ±0.4 | ±0.4 | ±0.3 | ±0.2 |
