Marta Kierek
Strategic Management I
Mercadona stakeholders – analysis of Mercadona stakeholders and
their classification
Mercadona, one of the biggest Spanish distribution companies, founded in Valencia in
1977 by the Roig family, has followed since its creation and spectacular development
process until reaching the “exercise 2020 closure”, a business digit of 26746 million €, a
gross benefit of 727, a team of around 95 thousand workers and a sales capacity of 1641
supermarkets (1621 in Spain and 20 in Portugal). That allowed it to reach the 37th place
in the minority market globally, according to 2021 Global Powers of Retailing, being the
second Spanish company in this ranking behind Inditex (23) and above El Corte Ingles
(69), DIA (137) and Eroski (212). In the same way, the company was second in 2020 in
the Spanish Índice Merco de Reputació n Empresarial, only behind Inditex, while its
president Juan Roig was recognized with the first place in the Líderes Empresariales
ranking as the most valued for its leadership capacity.
To achieve this level of development, Mercadona designed years ago a business model
around the general philosophy of Total Quality, under the general slogan that if you
satisfy clients, sales arrive, with them the benefits and, from there, the shared growth.
This model takes them to realign their objectives between their different interest
groups, fixing the next priority order: Clients, workers, providers, society, and
stakeholders.
The stakeholders coincide with the five components identified in the Total Quality
Model ("The Boss", The Employee, The Supplier, Society and Capital). All of them are
significantly impacted by the activities, products and services of the company, which
seeks to satisfy their needs. Knowing their expectations and demands is a fundamental
aspect for creating value in the business.
The client is considered the main interest group to the point that it is known in the
company as “the boss”. That is, all the relevant decisions are directed to satisfy the
necessities of alimentation, cleaning, and personal hygiene of the consumers under the
general slogan of offering the best quality-price ratio, keeping high-quality levels, variety
of product brands, and client service, with reasonable prices. In 2020, Mercadona fed
around 5.5 million Spanish houses, with a distribution surface reaching 15.5% of the
total distribution surface in Spain. Another remarkable fact is the innovation capacity to
continuously offer new products to their clients that, in the last years, meant around 300
new annual references.
The second group in importance is the workers, based on the model of leadership,
effort, and satisfaction of the team. This is achieved from some relatively favourable
labour conditions for the workers, based in the contact type (usually undefined), a salary
above the industry’s average (for example, in 2020, a newly joined base worker was
earning a gross salary of 1338€), balanced working and family lives, gender equality,
health conditions, and job security, inside promotion priority, personal formation and
shared benefit, shown in the distribution of their employees of 409M million in “primes
concept” for objectives.
With respect to the suppliers, Mercadona follows the principle of keeping stable
relations under the philosophy of building a Sustainable Agroalimentary Chain. For that,
it traditionally kept a special relationship with the so-called “intersuppliers”, that in
2019 changed to the figure of “proveedores totalers (total providers)”. The latter are
manufacturers with whom they established some deals of long-term provisioning, with
the compromise of product segregation and co-innovation, competitive prices, and with
sustainable and socially responsible elaboration processes. Their products are
distributed under “marcas blancas (in Spanish cheap brands)”, being the most known
ones Hacendado (alimentation), Bosque Verde (cleaning) or Deliplus (personal hygiene).
However, the name of the manufacturer is always shown in the package/container. In
2020, the company had around 1400 “proveedores totalers (total providers)”.
With respect to society, the company holds a compromise with the social and economic
development of the zones where it is present and is respectful of the environment. In
2020, as a consequence of its activity volume, its contribution to the national Gross
Domestic Product was numbered 2.22%. The impact with respect to employment in
Spain for the direct or indirect activity generated by the Mercadona environment was
reaching 661 thousand people and its financial contribution to the public
administrations passed the 1900 million €. Apart from numerous acts of social
responsibility, it had collaborated intensely with 290 social diners and more than 60
food banks, to whom it had donated around 17 thousand tons of food.
Lastly, the capital, represented by shareholders, is ruled by the principle that the
benefit arrives after satisfying the rest of the components of the company. The company
has seen growth systematically both the business figure as the result in the last years,
until reaching, in 2020, a Ebitda and gross result of 1550 and 727 million €, respectively.
Although the priority politic is the reinvestment of benefits to financing new
investments (in 2020, 1600 million € were invested), the reasonable levels of
profitability have allowed the self/proper/own resources to reach in 2020 6664 million
€, with a return over self/own funds (ROE) of 11%.
For Mercadona, transparency and dialogue are indisputable values that the company
defends and promotes across the board. Consequently, it shares its growth and results
with employees, suppliers and society through various meetings and channels such as
this Annual Report, the Environmental Report, the press conference on satisfying the
Five Components, the internal communication channel Activo2, the website and social
networks and the transparency portal.
Sources:
Los grupos de interes en Mercadona – Jose Emilio Navas Lopez & Luis Angel Guerras
https://info.mercadona.es/document/en/annual-report-2020.pdf
