Tesco extends market dominance
Its closest rival, Musgraves of Cork, is also understood to have boosted its figures placing it about 4% behind the British multi-national in the Irish economy.
Dunnes Stores at 22.2% is believed to have lost in the market to trail Musgraves by about 0.3% overall.
Tesco also dominated the bigger retail picture when it published its trading performance for the Christmas period yesterday.
It came close to meeting market expectations with growth of 5.7%. However, the market was unimpressed and the shares dropped over 2% in early trading to ÂŁ3.11, a fall of 7p on the day.
Tesco issued figures for the Christmas period showing it continued to outstrip its British rivals despite intense competition from Asda, Sainsbury and Morrisons.
Britain’s biggest supermarket chain said same-store sales excluding petrol transactions were 5.7% higher in the seven weeks to January 7, up from 5.5% in the previous three months and in line with City forecasts.
Tesco said its premium Tesco Finest range sold particularly well, while it continued to benefit from non-food sales with home entertainment, electronics, clothing, toys and gifts performing strongly.
But some analysts were unimpressed with the international sales increase of 16.1%, that compared with a 23% rise for the quarter to November 19.
Andrew Fowler, analyst with Merrill Lynch, said there was “no surprisingly good news” outside Britain. With the group continuing to expand, he added “we’d say there’s been a clear like-for-like slowdown”.
More than half of Tesco’s retail space is outside Britain, with more than 100,000 staff employed in its international operations.
The firm has a presence in 12 countries outside Britain, including China, Japan, Thailand, Poland and Hungary.
A Tesco Ireland spokesman said he was not commenting at this stage and would wait until the group published end-of-year figures. But he confirmed the group had increased sales in Ireland.
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