MercoPress. South Atlantic News Agency

Chile supermarket industry booming: one new store every three days

Punta Arenas has the one supermarket for every 8.000 residents

Chilean supermarket chain owners –mainly Wall-Mart, Cencosud, Unimarc and Supermercados del Sur –are planning the construction of 125 new supermarkets in 2010--an average of one new store every three days. This will be a 12.5% increase to the current 1,003 supermarkets in the country.

Currently, there is approximately one supermarket for every 8,000 inhabitants in the southern city of Punta Arenas (Region XII) but only one for every 22,000 inhabitants in the Santiago Metropolitan Region.

Supermarket shopping in Chile lags behind shopping in more developed countries. Statistics given by the president of the Association of Supermarkets, Fernando Alvear, show that 61% of shopping in Chile is done at big supermarkets –as opposed to more traditional open-air markets and smaller stores – while 85% of shoppers in Europe and the United States get their groceries from supermarket chains.

Distribucion y Servicio (D&S), a Chilean company that runs grocery stores Líder, Ekono and Superbodega Acuenta (ST,Dec. 2008), plans on opening 60 new stores next year with an average cost of over 200 million US dollars. (D&S was bought by Wal-Mart in January 2008.) The Hiper Líder and Líder Express stores see an average total of 4.5 million monthly visitors.

Supermarket chain Unimarc plans to open 49 stores with an estimated cost of more than 300 million USD. Another store, Falabella--a huge Chilean retailer that runs its own supermarket chain, Tottus, plans on opening 17 new stores between 2010 and 2012.

Other supermarket chains to open new stores in the coming year are Jumbo, Santa Isabel and Montserrat.

In 2008, the supermarket industry made 8.5 billion USD in sales; in 2009, estimates are for 4 to 5 percent increase in this amount. Most supermarkets built between 2007 and 2008 in Chile were constructed in strip malls. The number of supermarkets located in malls has risen from 22% in 2003 to 36% in 2008.

By Gida Homad-Hamam - Santiago Times