SWOT Analysis of Morrison

SWOT Analysis of Morrison

Introduction

Wm Morrison is one of the UK's largest grocery retailers known for their good quality food at low prices. William Morrison was originally a bread and butter seller. He started this chain of supermarket in the year 1899. He started his business by opening the very first stall in Bradford. Later on he expanded and started opening stalls in the nearby marketplace. As a result his business started flourishing rapidly and he was able to have his very own retail stores by 1920, offering counter service to customers through his very own outlet. He continued opening new stores and taking over other stores for expansion within the region. He took over Whelans Discount Supermarket that had 10 stores and Mainstore Grocery Store group which further supported the expansion process. Morrison's competitive advantage was that it had its own subsidiaries of packaging, distribution and products which help in cost reduction and providing this benefit to the customer in terms of lower prices. After the final takeover of Safeway, it has total of 455 stores operating successfully in England.

Discussion

Strengths

1. Its major strength is providing value for price to its customer. Offering fresh and good quality food items at low cost is a major positive point that plays an important role in customer retention (BookRags, 2012).

2. It promotes the concept of Market Street by providing a variety of fresh and good quality food to the customers just round the corner. It not only gives customers a different environment but also helps in reduction of cost.

3. It is the food specialist, since it buys live stocks on its own. Majority of the food that is sold at Morrison is prepared in house. Having its very own freshly made food items also gives it an edge over its competitors. 80 percent of the products that are sold in the store are packaged and distributed from Morrison's factories (Talking Retail, 2007).

4. It has a well integrated supply chain system and strong infrastructure that helps in reducing the cost. It has a unit that does the packaging of the products, prepared under the label of Morrison. In addition to this it has a distribution unit that distributes its freshly prepared food items to the stores (Morrisons, 2012).

5. Acquistion of Safeway will increase its market share.

Weaknesses

1. Since it promoted the concept of Market Street to the customers, its network and infrastructure in terms of information technology is not very well developed.

2. Its outbound logistics or checking out facility is not very impressive if compared with the competitors (BookRags, 2012).

3. It lacks in terms of services and needs a lot of improvement in this area.

4. Need to invest more in the training of its employees to improve their services and after sales services.

5. Its in house services and outsourcing facility of products is complicated and can pose issues during its expansions of stores. They must analyze the pros and cons of ...