麦肯锡-零售业的佼佼者：价值创造的教训（英）

September 2024Retail PracticeRetail’s outperformers: Lessons in value creationWhat does it take to create value in the intensely competitive retail industry—especially if you’re not a big retailer? A new analysis reveals what’s worked.This article is a collaborative effort by Becca Coggins and Steve Begley, with Carson Green, Jad Hamdan, and Susan Nolen Foushee, representing views from McKinsey’s Retail and Strategy & Corporate Finance Practices.When it comes to value creation, retailers have never had it easy. The challenges are well-known: consumer preferences and behaviors are fast changing and rarely predictable. Many retail businesses are highly dependent on supplier actions—a fact that’s become evident to consumers in recent years as supply chain disruptions resulted in rampant out-of-stocks. Given retailers’ heavy reliance on frontline workers, fluctuations in labor markets have a more pronounced effect on retail than on other sectors. And typically thin margin profiles mean that retailer valuations are exceedingly sensitive to macroeconomic conditions, capital costs, and investor expectations.It hasn’t been getting any easier as of late. Indeed, an ever-shrinking number of retailers accounts for most of the value creation in the sector. This group consists almost entirely of retail giants, with revenue exceeding $50 billion each. What’s more, one in four retailers are now destroying value, up from one in six just 15 years ago.Is this an irreversible trend? Must less-than-gigantic retailers resign themselves to low returns? Is scale—or the lack of it—the ultimate determinant of a retailer’s success?The answer to these questions is, unequivocally, no. Our analysis of more than 280 publicly traded retailers1 reveals that, through bold action and disciplined execution, retailers of all sizes can become high-performing value creators—and can even move from the bottom quartile to the top quartile. Our findings give retail executives a blueprint for realizing the full potential of their businesses, regardless of their starting point.Grow big or get boldThere isn’t just one valid metric to quantify value creation. Total shareholder returns (TSR), return on invested capital (ROIC), and economic profit, to name three, are each an important performance metric for any retail management team and board to monitor and debate. For our analysis, we looked at economic profit (defined as the spread between ROIC and the cost of capital multiplied by the amount of invested capital) to isolate financial performance from the volatility of market expectations.Scale begets scaleFrom an industry-wide perspective, the picture actually looks quite rosy. The retail sector’s economic profit doubled over the past 15 years, growing at a 6.8 percent clip per year—from $67 billion in 2010 to $159 billion in 2023.2But a closer look reveals trouble: the sector’s upward trend in economic profit masks vast disparities across retailers. Value creation is becoming more concen