Beatrice Blake, Manager, Bord Bia London

After a prolonged period of market share erosion the latest TNS retail share track report for Great Britain covering the twelve week period to 1st November 2009 shows early signs of a recovery in Tesco’s market share performance.  This has been a challenging year for Tesco GB.  The retailer grew sales by 5% slightly lagging the total market performance at 5.2% and significantly underperforming versus key competitors such as Morrison’s +9% and Asda +8.2%.

Whilst Tesco's 52 week market share has remained static at 27.1%, its twelve week market share has edged up by +0.3% to 27.4%.  On the face of it this is good news for the retailer and may be an indication that the Clubcard re-launch is having the desired effect on sales as well as on loyalty which has grown from 34.3% a year ago to 35.4% now. 

The results do however come with a health warning as 6.4% of Tesco's last twelve week sales growth came from products on promotion whereas only 1.6% came from non-promoted product.  The only retailer with a heavier reliance on sales promotion was Asda where promotion contributed 6.4% of growth.  By contrast only 1.6% of Sainsbury’s growth came from promoted product and 9.4% of Waitrose’s recent sales recovery came from non-promoted product.  It will be interesting to see for how much longer Tesco can sustain this level of aggressive sales promotion.