The future belongs to large supermarket chains
This article in the NRC Handelsblad, of 24 August 1988, caught Fred Lachotzki at the end of his tenure as managing director of the Dutch food wholesaler Unigro, just before he took up a position on the Executive Board of the German supermarket chain ASKO. From the unique perspective that afforded him, he offered a number of interesting observations on the Dutch supermarket sector, and on pan-European developments generally. The piece also supplied a short summary of Lachotzki's varied business career, which began with a series of positions of increasing responsibility within the Ahold organization.
The immediate motive for this article was the merger of Ahold and the competing Dutch supermarket company Schuitema. As an act in itself, Lachotzki viewed this with disfavor since Unigro had also been angling for some sort of merger with Schuitema, and the latter's ultimate decision to opt for Ahold involved some bad-faith bargaining. Such consolidation of supermarket enterprises was nonetheless a necessary condition for survival in Lachotzki's opinion, given the opening-up of commercial borders across Europe in connection with the EU's Single Market initiative due for completion in 1992. He was confident that Unigro could go on to find other partners, and looked forward to his VP/director's role at ASKO, a German concern that had already embarked upon a series of acquisitions. On the other hand, situations of excessive market concentration needed to be prevented, by governmental regulation if necessary, and this was something he saw occurring in the Netherlands with the 35% market-share of the new Ahold/Schuitema combination.
