ENGLISH: The crisis closes a cycle - the new era of FMCG markets

Once upon a time there was a generation that was born in a deep crisis (the one of the 40s), they created a society with total freedom, they prospered and ... unfortunately did not have enough with their own prosperity and started to speculate. Now many of our parents have understood that their apparent fortunes were backed by the credit society of their sons, who, leveraged and mortgaged up to their ears, eventually collapsed under that burden. Probably this generation of children will also have to pay for the invoice of that disaster, when states and countries in 10 years begin to adopt measures in order to recover the debts generated by the thousands of aide plans that are currently put in practice.
And what does that have to do with the FMCG sector?
Well, it is the first to suffer the consequences of that new model for the economy that begins to evolve from the previous cycle: the one of luxury bought today but paid tomorrow is over! It is now back to auto-financing in the sense that you pay with what you have! Mercadona in Spain, Delhaize in Belgium and the many retailers that will start to reduce their assortments are simply responding to a new type of behaviour by their “boss”, the final customer (our “Shopsumer”) who wants to avoid variety in order to buy the basics, the honest stuff and the minimum that is necessary. We will see that the thousands of square meters of commercial surface that were constructed in recent years have also been one of those luxuries (once again: backed by real estate speculation by the previous generation), which we have to start eliminating. Whoever wants variety has the perfect means for it at hand: the online store, where, with an intelligent segmentation structure, one can place both the minimum assortment that’s necessary as well as the large width on a second level for the fanatic Shopsumer. Manufacturers as well as retailers have to start rationalising their portfolios, with few well-positioned products for the large majority of people and maybe large variety for very few. The ones who complain about this “brutal” rationality in this current preliminary phase, probably have to learn their lesson with more agony in the future.