Economic – Local/National level
ASDA offers Britain’s best value weekly shop with prices 10 – 15% lower than their main competitors and an unmatchable mix of fresh food, grocery, clothing, home, leisure and entertainment goods.
ASDA employs 109,000 colleagues, who have a reputation for being the best and the friendliest in the industry. Approximately 74,000 are part-time colleagues and 35,000 are full-time. Currently female store managers run 7% of ASDA’s stores and the aim is that this will increase to 30% by 2003.
Over the past five years, ASDA, in total, has developed 1.8 million square feet of sales representing an investment of more than £1.3 billion. Over the next three years ASDA plans to develop between 30-40 new stores, which will be an investment of over £1billion.
Only 16 of the Asda stores fall within the Government’s own definition of “out of town”. To help stores become part of their surrounding environment, ASDA spent £100,000 on average on landscaping for each store.
The Wal-Mart name appeared on a UK store for the first in 2000, when the first ASDA Wal-Mart supercentre opened in Bristol, bringing a unique shopping experience to British customers with the best of both organisation’s products on offer. Two more supercentres were launched at Havant and Minworth last year, with the idea for a total of ten by 2006.
ASDA continues to widen the gap between their competitors. ASDA were 11.2% cheaper than their competitors.
Economic – Global level
ASDA became part of the Wal-Mart family on 26 July 1999. For more information, refer to the introduction at the beginning of the report.
The Wal-Mart Company was formed in 1965 by a group of farmers from Yorkshire, and now has 245 stores and 19 depots across the UK.
Unique to ASDA is the George fashion range, which was launched in 1990 when George Davies, founder of the Next chain of high street stores joined the business. From only five stores, the George label has grown into a £600m business in 215 stores. George works with approximately 200 suppliers in the UK, Europe and across the world. George launched in January 2001, the prices on average were 30% lower than the standard ranges with no compromise on quality.
In 2000 ASDA opened Britain’s first multi-lingual superstore in Bradford, West Yorkshire. The store features customer service signage in three languages – Urdu, Punjabi and English. Forty seven per cent of the new colleagues employed are Asian, again meeting ASDA’s commitment to reflect the local population profile in the workforce.
Asda leads the way in giving customers the products that they want at the best possible value
Socio-Cultural – Local level
Asda can help put life back into areas of urban deprivation and have an unrivalled record of developing stores in such locations, e.g. Moss side, Longsight, which re the are the areas of Manchester.
The store – an ASDA Wal-Mart supercentre – will bring £40 million of investment and £1,000 new jobs to an area of Manchester that has been designated for regeneration in line with the government’s recent Urban White Paper.
Socio-Cultural – National level
The Wal-Mart name appeared on a UK store for the first time in 2000, when the first ASDA Wal-Mart supercentre opened in Bristol, bringing a unique shopping experience to British customers with the best of both organisations’ products on offer.
ASDA leads the way in giving UK customers the products that they want at the best possible value.
ASDA has always been committed to keeping prices permanently low, something that ASDA’s customers value and recognise. Since joining the Wal-Mart Mart family in 1999, ASDA’s customer numbers have grown from 6.5 million to 8 million per week and for the fourth time running, ASDA has been voted ‘Britain’s best value supermarket’ by the Grocer 33.
ASDA has been continually investing in customer services. £8 million was invested in the first quarter of this year (2001), which lead to a 50% improvement in queue lengths.
Life improvement to urban deprivation areas also included places like Birmingham, Liverpool, London and Hull.
ASDA collects and recycles 50% of all store waste. Approximately 80% of all cardboard used to pack products coming into store is recycled. To reduce waste sent to landfill sites. Also investing in food waste composting and plastic recycling.
ASDA has 185 sites with glass banks, 160 sites with paper banks, 191 sites with can banks, 43 sites with plastic banks and 121 sites with textile/shoe banks.
To reduce noise pollution, all refrigerated trailer units have low noise refrigeration equipment fitted, all vehicles have reversing warning lights, etc.
ASDA has also developed a supply-chain environmental training programme which aims to reduce the environmental impact of ASDA suppliers’ activities including energy use, waste generation, resource use, packaging use and transportation.
The ASDA Foundation is ASDA’s own charity, set up to support the good causes. The examples are:
- Get involved – colleagues given a special grant towards a customer nominated practical project for a local good cause.
- The Big Read – in support of the UK Government’s National Year of Literacy.
- The Big Sum – aimed at bringing numbers to life for local school in support of the UK Government’s Maths Year 2000.
- The Big Eat – aimed at promoting healthy eating and creating nutritional understanding among primary school children.
- ASDA Local Heroes Awards – introduced in 2000 to recognise and honour those people in the local communities who really do make the difference.
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Breast Cancer Care – 5th year of supporting the Breast Cancer Care. Colleagues raised over £1.4 million for the charity.
Socio-Cultural – Global level
Unique to ASDA is the GEORGE fashion range launched in 1990 when George Davies, founder of the Next chain of high street stores, joined the business. George works with approximately 200 suppliers in the UK, Europe and across the world.
Three food and non-food brands were developed by an Anglo-German new product development team have been introduced to ASDA. The team has created an European portfolio of products that represent the best of ASDA and Wal-Mart’s food experience.
The Wal-Mart European brands team will help the environment by reducing packaging wherever possible. Both ASDA and Wal-Mart Germany will pick the products best suited for their customers from the new ranges.
Technological – Local/National level
ASDA is trying to reduce the environmental impacts associated with the siting and construction of ASDA’s stores. The technological impact is by using the latest construction technology to minimise raw materials and energy used in construction.
ASDA is reducing energy in their stores and also investing in renewable energy sources. ASDA is running a number of innovative alternative energy trials, and introducing the latest energy saving technologies into stores and distribution centres.
Another technological advance introduced a few years ago is shopping via the Internet. People now use the Internet system to do their shopping rather than visiting the store. The Internet shopping can be more useful for customers such as for families, because if both couples work and not have time to visit the store, and also shopping can be delivered to their homes. Also Internet shopping can be useful for pregnant women, retired/pensioners and disabled people, who have difficulty in travelling.
The above aspects also apply to the global level due to ASDA being part of the Wal-Mart family, which is a large organisation spread across the world; although Wal-Mart stores will have more technological advancements.
For more information on ASDA, refer to appendices 1-8, and/or visit the website at .
Conclusion
ASDA is a well-established organisation and communicating well with their customers and have made a lot of improvements. As ASDA has joined the Wal-Mart family, ASDA stores are working much more better and making more profits from a large number of customers due to attracting more customers to achieve both of the ASDA and Wal-Mart products under one roof. ASDA has more socio-cultural and economic aspects and ASDA’s main competitors would be stores like Tesco, Sainsbury, Kwik Save, etc.
