Oireachtas Joint and Select Committees
Thursday, 18 April 2013
Joint Oireachtas Committee on Agriculture, Food and the Marine
Groceries Sector: Discussion (Resumed)
10:20 am
Mr. Donald Mackay:
Is Deputy Heydon asking whether we consider it to be a competitive market? I guess he is asking about the players that exist within the market. In our opinion, as we have grown, we have made it progressively more competitive. As our share of the market grows, pressure is naturally applied to all the other players in the market. We think that by offering everyday low prices, as Mr. O’Connor described, rather than raising and lowering prices on an ongoing basis, it puts a lot of pressure on everyone else to reduce their prices in order not to allow market share to transfer from them to us as we grow, but of course we have grown. Mr. O’Connor has mentioned that. We opened our 100th store today. We are going to open a second distribution centre in Mitchelstown in Cork in September and we will continue to expand through the two distribution centres and to open the 20 stores we have said we will open over the next three years. That will not be the end of it. We will continue to grow from there. The two distribution centres have a far larger capacity than the 120 stores we have already indicated. The market is competitive and we play a part in making it competitive.
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