Retailers need not look back in anger

Domestic supermarket chains, together with some major suppliers, have been calling on the central government to check what they see as the encroachment of foreign retail giants in their own backyards.

The long running battle pits hundreds of relatively smaller domestic operators against a couple of foreign retailers, namely Carrefour of France and Wal-Mart of the United States. In this fight, it looks like the native Davids are losing ground to the alien Goliaths.

The strategies and tactics of the contestants on both sides have been exhaustively dissected and discussed by industry experts. They seem to agree that size matters in the supermarket business. This has apparently prompted the Shanghai municipal government to take the positive step of combining several State-owned enterprises in retailing to create a conglomerate deemed big enough to compete with the foreign behemoths.