Grocery giant Tesco set to become top non-food retailer

Last updated at 16:26 09 August 2006


Tesco is on track to become the UK's number one non-food retailer, a new report says.

Its expansion into clothing, electricals, entertainment and homeware has boosted its share of the £168billion sector.

It is set to overtake the Argos Retail Group - the company behind Argos and Homebase - to become the UK's biggest non-food retailer this year, market analysts Verdict say. Tesco is already the UK's biggest grocery retailer ahead of rival chains Asda and Sainsbury's.

Report author Alistair Lockhart said Tesco's huge customer base had helped its expansion into non-food: "One of the things that gives Tesco a massive advantage is it gets tremendous footfall coming through the door," he said.

"By allocating more and more space to non-food they are able to attract a lot of sales by having a high-profile, competitive position."

Verdict predicts that Tesco will take a 3.6 per cent slice of the non-food market this year - up from 3.2 per cent last year. This will put it ahead of the Argos Retail Group's 3.5 per cent.

Mr Lockhart said the big players still had relatively small percentages of the non-food sector because the market was so fragmented. Non-food includes everything apart from groceries.

Tesco, Asda and Sainsbury's together outperformed the rest of the non-food market by almost doubling their combined share of the sector in the five years to 2005, Verdict's report says.

Comments (0)

Share what you think

No comments have so far been submitted. Why not be the first to send us your thoughts, or debate this issue live on our message boards.

We are no longer accepting comments on this article.

Who is this week's top commenter? Find out now