Shoppers in Australia spent almost one billion dollars less at Woolworths over the year to September 2016 compared with the previous 12 months and took it across the street to Coles and down the road to ALDI, according to Roy Morgan Research.
The company’s latest quarterly ‘Supermarket Grocery Currency Report’ indicates that Australia’s grocery buyers spent $89.8 billion at supermarkets during the 2015/16 period, which is 87 per cent of the total $103 billion spent on groceries overall.
Roy Morgan Research estimates Australians spent $32.6 billion at Woolworths in the year to September (36.3 percent of all supermarket expenditure nationally). This is down $825 million compared with the previous year, representing a decline in market share of 1.4 percentage points.
This is the second consecutive year that expenditure at Woolworths (and its market share) has declined – from a peak of $34.4 billion in the year to September 2014, or 40 per cent of that year’s market share.
Meanwhile, shoppers spent $29.8 billion at Coles this past year, $1.1billion more than the year before. Coles’ gained 0.9 percentage points in market share, up to 33.2 per cent.
ALDI claimed the other 0.5 percentage points. The German discount supermarket took in 12.5 per cent of Australia’s supermarket dollars ($11.2 billion).
IGA gained 0.3 percentage points of market share year on year to 9.8 per cent ($8.8 billion), while the share for all other supermarkets combined fell by the same amount, down to 8.1 per cent ($7.3 billion).