Showing posts with label retail. Show all posts
Showing posts with label retail. Show all posts

Thursday 13 March 2014

Ocado and Amazon: Working out nicely

"Amazon, not Tesco, will be Ocado’s biggest threat in 20 years’ time" said boss Tim Steiner at RetailWeekLive this morning. That's no surprise, he would say that, wouldn't he! The real surprise will be if Ocado are still around in 20 months time.

Back in the day, the Former Kingfisher FD, Archie Norman, joined Asda when it almost faced ruin. He set about turning the company into Walmart UK without anyone really commenting. In-store pos went to the now, long familiar, blackboards; large trays to connote market stalls were introduced in fresh and teams of category buyers flew off to Bentonville to learn how to do business the Walmart way. And crucially, Asda only had a UK vision. Then came his masterstroke: he began takeover talks with Sir Geoffrey Mulcahy his former boss at Kingfisher and before you could say EDLP - Walmart had its UK operation. Plugged and played. Norman, naturally, never spoke a word of this publicly.

Ocado are doing a great job building online supermarket fulfilment capability in the UK. Amazon are here and playing a long game. They have time and money: they just need the muscle. In the same way Walmart didn't see any value setting up to compete with Asda, recognising the heavy lifting had already been done; expect Amazon to take the same view of Ocado. Don't be surprised if the first time you hear of this deal, it is already happened. That will be real fulfilment for Steiner - and its all working out nicely.