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Juan Roig lowers prices
MERCADONA, Spain’s largest supermarket chain, is cutting the price of 500 items by 10 cents to ease the cost of living crisis.
The initiative should bring an annual saving of €150 for each client, Mercadona said.
The familyowned company would remain faithful to its commitment to lower retail prices as cost prices fell, Mercadona sources added. These were already falling but because it was a slow process, they explained that the company had decided to get ahead by lowering the price of 500 staple products, which would be singled out in the shops.
The chain also plans to take advantage of market opportunities to lower the price of fresh produce.
The initiative will cost the company around €200 million with a 0.6 percentage point effect on its profit margin, which Mercadona calculates has shrunk by 1.1 percentage points since 2020.
Presenting last year’s accounts and announcing net profits of €718 million, Mercadona president Juan Roig admitted that prices had increased “tremendously” but pointed out that these
AMAZON’S proposed takeover of iRobot, makers of Roomba vacuum cleaner, is under scrutiny from the UK’s Competition and Markets authority (CMA).
Amazon is keen to expand its smart home appliances operation, but the CMA is looking into whether the deal could lead to what it described as a “substantial lessening of competition.” rose by 10 per cent while the company’s overheads increased by 14 per cent. The discounts were not a temporary measure, Mercadona said. Nor were they a “shopping basket” of products with fixed prices like those of French supermarkets but were permanent reductions.
Checking out
Amazon announced that it was buying Massachusettsbased iRobot last August in a $1.7 billion (€1.5 billion) takeover agreement but a month later the US authorities announced that they would review the deal.
In February 2023, the Financial Times revealed that European competition au thorities also planned to examine the takeover.
Both Amazon and iRobot said they were “working cooperatively” with the regulators over the merger.
The CMA is also investigating Amazon’s fake online reviews while another probe centres on anticompetitive practices.
