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Asda Stores Limited is an American-owned, British founded supermarket retailer, headquartered in Leeds, West Yorkshire. The company became a subsidiary of the American retail corporate giant Walmart after a £6.7 billion takeover in July 1999, and is now the second-largest supermarket chain by market share. Besides its core supermarket retail format, the company also offers a number of other products including financial services and a mobile phone company using the existing network of EE. Asda's marketing promotions are usually based solely on price, and like its Parent Company, Walmart, Asda promotes itself under the slogan ''Save Money. Live Better.''〔(【引用サイトリンク】title=About Asda )〕 As a wholly owned division of Walmart, Asda is not required to declare quarterly or half-yearly earnings. It submits full accounts to Companies House each November. ==History== The Asquith family were butchers based in Knottingley, West Yorkshire. In the 1920s, their rising aspirations meant that they expanded their business to 7 butcher's shops in the area. The sons, Peter and Fred would later become founding members of ASDA. Around the same time a group of West Riding dairy farmers, including the Stockdale family and Craven Dairies, joined together under the banner of J.W Hindell Dairy Farmers Ltd. This company diversified in 1949 to become Associated Dairies and Farm Stores Ltd, with Arthur Stockdale as the Managing Director. In 1963 the Asquith brothers converted an old cinema, the Queens in Castleford into a self-service supermarket. Another swiftly followed in the old indoor market at Edlington, near Doncaster. Both stores traded under the name of 'Queens'. Instead of converting an existing building their next store was a purpose built supermarket in South Elmsall, near Pontefract on the site of the old Palace cinema. It was in 1965 when the Asquith brothers approached Associated Dairies to run the butchery departments within their small store chain that a merger was proposed. So they joined together with Noel Stockdale, Arthur Stockdale's son to form a new company, ''Asquith + Dairies'' = Asda (capitalised from 1985). Another store opened in Wakefield and one in Whitkirk, Leeds which consolidated the newly formed supermarket division of Associated Dairies. By 1967 the company had moved outside of Yorkshire to set up a store in the North East in the industrial town of Billingham, Teeside which is still trading as of 2015. By 1968 the Asquith brothers had sold their stake in the merger and the Asda Queens stores became the sole property of Associated. Asda took advantage of the abolition of retail price maintenance in order to offer large-scale, low-cost supermarkets. This was aided by the risky decision to acquire three struggling US owned branches in the mid-1960s of the GEM retail group. The Government Exchange Mart stores in Preston, Lancashire, Cross Gates, Leeds and including the first out-of-town store in West Bridgford, Nottingham that opened in November 1964, had accumulated losses of £320,000 and offered to sell the stores for 20% of whatever Asda could recoup as losses from the Inland Revenue. They received the whole amount back so got the stores for free. The rent was only 10 shillings (50p) per square foot on a 20-year lease, with no rent reviews- all in all a great deal. Asda increased GEM's £6,000 per week sales to around £60,000 per week in just six months with the new stores named solely as just Asda.〔(【引用サイトリンク】title=Asda through the years - ASDA.com )〕 Asda rebuilt the West Bridgford store in 1999, adjacent to the old site which was demolished and is now part of the current store car park. The Preston store was based on the ground floor of a converted mill which had been occupied by a supermarket called Fame prior to GEM taking over, and then subsequently Asda. The mill was demolished in the mid-1980s when Asda opened two new purpose-built superstores in the area. One was in the centre of Preston located at the Fishergate shopping centre, which closed in 1992 less than 7 years after opening due to poor trading. And the second was located in the suburban district of Fulwood. The Fulwood store is still trading today and is a very popular store. The Cross Gates store in Leeds was closed in 1992 along with the Whitkirk store and their replacement was a large superstore built in the Killingbeck area of the city which had opened in the autumn of 1991. The 1970s saw Asda rapidly expanding to open large superstores in edge-and out-of-town locations, and to build stores with district centres in smaller towns. It also added more petrol filling stations to stores, along with car tyre bays run by ATS. With over 30 stores in the North of England, Asda began their expansion into the south of the country with the opening of new stores in Plymouth, Devon and Gosport, Hampshire in 1976. Closely followed by its first store in South Wales in Rogerstone, Newport; South Woodham Ferrers, near Chelmsford, Essex and Whitchurch, Bristol. By 1981, there were 80 Asda stores trading but the growth of the chain was slowing and their southern expansion had been expensive. They had been fighting with southern rivals Tesco and Sainsbury's to acquire prime retail sites in the more affluent South East counties of England. Indeed, it wasn't until 1982 that the first London store opened in Park Royal, near Ealing which was rebuilt in 2000. The seventies and eighties saw the diversification of Asda's product base including the acquisition of Allied Carpets in 1978, Wades Furniture, Asda Property and Asda Drive, where the company unsuccessfully piloted a scheme to sell cars in a few of its largest stores. The 1980s were a turbulent period for Asda as they moved away from their founding principles of price competitiveness and good value. Attempts to halt Asda's decline included the development of completely new look stores, first trialled in 1985 at a 3 year old store in Leamington Spa, Warwickshire, which contrasted with older Asda stores with their spartan minimalistic interiors and chocolate brown and beige artexed walls. A new green corporate logo which was capitalised as ASDA was also introduced. More upmarket and tastefully decorated stores with soft pastel colour tones, dropped ceilings and zoned areas, more specialist fresh food counters and softer lighting were introduced along with the launch of Asda own label products in 1986, centralised distribution depots by 1989, and by the end of the decade the Asdale named clothing range was replaced by the clothing ranges from the newly formed George Davies partnership with Asda. Davies was an experienced and successful entrepreneur who had founded the Next clothing chain of retail stores. These changes were initially positive for the company but they came at a cost. The recession of the early 1990s impacted on the average household budget and affected the amount of disposable income that the average consumer had to spend, and with rising inflation it hit Asda customers whose stores were more heavily concentrated in the north than in the more affluent south east harder. The move upmarket had also pushed in-store service and labour costs up which impacted on profit margins and sales. Asda had also neglected many of the older stores within its estate by not refurbishing them in line with other stores that had been refurbished and its more expensive new store sites. One example was the Astley Bridge, Bolton store which had been built in 1970. That store didn't receive its first major refurbishment until 1993, and was until that point still trading with the old blue and orange Asda corporate logo and signage attached to the building in various positions, and there were many other stores like that. It meant that Asda had left the older, outdated unrefurbished stores in locations where competitors were opening new stores more vulnerable to losing customers to their shiny new rivals. Asda had also heavily increased prices across its ranges to try and offset growing operating costs and increase volume sales and margins which had narrowed within its stores, as a result customers deserted the chain in droves. This was compounded by problems with start-up costs and teething troubles with the new regional distribution depots. Computer systems taking restock orders from stores and then ordering goods, especially fresh food, from suppliers that were meant to come into the depots and then delivered on to the stores were not functioning properly, which meant stores ran out of stock of some items for days at a time. That also meant that the company had to temporarily use manual ordering, which of course meant a loss of sales at stores and wastage costs that ran into tens of millions of pounds. Asda was entering a vicious circle with a flawed and compromised trading strategy and with a management team who were floundering and in charge of a company heading into a steady decline. Between 1985 and 1987, Asda Stores Ltd, merged with MFI (Mullard Furniture Industries) and the group was renamed Asda-MFI plc. The other companies in the group were Associated Dairies Limited, the furniture retailer MFI and Allied Carpets. After the sale of MFI in 1987 the company name changed to Asda Group plc. The dairy division was renamed Associated Fresh Foods, the abattoir and meat processing plant at Lofthouse, near Wakefield which supplied fresh meat to all Asda stores was renamed as Lofthouse Foods. But in 1993 the whole fresh food division, including the Asda Produce, fruit and vegetable packing plant in Normanton, Wakefield, was sold off in a management buyout to other dairy and food processors. In the same year Allied Carpets and Furnishings was sold off to the now defunct Carpetland.〔(【引用サイトリンク】 Cinven – Realised investments )〕 Which means that Asda has since had no connection with any of the firms from which its name was derived. Having effectively outgrown and divested of its parent company, Associated Dairies, which it was only originally the small minor supermarket division of at first, and only initially thought would contribute a modest profit when compared to the wider interests of the dairy division which included dairies, creameries and abattoirs. With stores mainly based in the North of England, the newly focused food retail group expanded further south in 1989 by buying the large format stores of rival Gateway Superstores for £705 million. City estimates suggested that Asda had overpaid by around £300 million for 61 of the largest Gateway stores, two undeveloped store sites and a distribution centre. That was far above the net book value of the locations some of which were poorly sited. This move overstretched the company and by 1991 it found itself in serious financial trouble and saddled with £1 billion worth of debt〔(【引用サイトリンク】title=ASDA/WAL-MART – A Corporate Profile )〕 The situation was so dire Asda was close to breaching its banking covenants and came very close to bankruptcy. The city at that point widely regarded Asda as a basket case and predicted an early demise for the chain. As a result, it was forced to raise money from shareholders in both 1991 and 1993 through two major rights issues. Asda was back in the black by late 1993 and completely transformed and revived by 1995 in one of the most successful turnaround stories in British retail history under the leadership of Archie Norman, who later became a front bench Conservative MP. CEO from 1991, Norman was chairman of the company during the period 1996–99, and remodelled the store along the lines of the world's largest retailer,〔(【引用サイトリンク】title=Global powers of retail report – wal mart remains world's largest global retailer )〕 Walmart, sending protégé Allan Leighton to Bentonville, Arkansas to assess and photograph the systems and marketing deployed by Walmart. When Norman left the company to pursue his political career, he was replaced by Leighton. Walmart wanted to enter the UK market so CEO Bob Martin lobbied British Prime Minister Tony Blair on planning issues. Asda, which at the time owned 229 stores, was purchased by Walmart on 26 July 1999 for £6.7 billion, trumping a rival bid from Kingfisher plc. Following the takeover, Asda retained its headquarters at "Asda House". It had been opened in 1988 by the then Prime Minister, Margaret Thatcher. Asda previously had an assortment of 7 different offices throughout Leeds, the largest being at the Britannia Mills site in Morley. This was demolished along with an older Asda superstore which was rebuilt with a larger sales area on land adjacent to the old site. The new head office building brought all of the administration departments under the same roof for the first time. This new building was also one of the first of the new large office blocks to open as part of the redevelopment of the huge area south of the River Aire in Leeds city centre, in the Holbeck district, West Yorkshire during the late 1980s. Asda has more recently also leased space in "The Mint" office development adjacent to the main head office site, and in part of the redevelopment of the former Carlsberg-Tetley brewery site across the road to support its ever-growing administration, IT operations, and e-commerce multi-channel platforms. In 2005, amid reported concerns within Walmart about a slippage in market share, partially due to a resurgent Sainsbury's, Asda's chief executive, Tony De Nunzio left, and was replaced by Andy Bond. In 2005, Asda expanded into Northern Ireland by purchasing 12 former Safeway stores from Morrisons. Asda's property development arm, Gazeley Limited, was sold to Economic Zones World (EZW), a Dubai World subsidiary, in June 2008 for in excess of £300m. Gazeley was involved in the development of distribution warehousing in the UK, mainland Europe and China, for customers including third-party logistics providers, original equipment manufacturers, retailers and their suppliers. In November 2008, there were reports that Asda was to buy Irish retailer Dunnes Stores. In August 2009, Walmart "sold" Asda for £6.9 billion to their Leeds-based investment subsidiary Corinth Services Limited. The deal was described as part of a "group restructuring" and meant Asda remained under the control of Walmart, since Corinth is itself a Walmart subsidiary. On 11 May 2010, Andy Clarke, a former manager of an Asda store, who was also the chief operating officer, was appointed as CEO. In May 2010, Asda bought all of Netto's UK operations in a £778 million deal. The deal provided the company with smaller, more localised stores, with most Netto stores being only one fifth the size of the average Asda supermarket. In September 2010, Asda was required to sell 47 of the existing 194 Netto stores following a ruling by the Office of Fair Trading. The rebranding of Netto stores to Asda began in early 2011. 抄文引用元・出典: フリー百科事典『 ウィキペディア（Wikipedia）』 ■ウィキペディアで「Asda」の詳細全文を読む スポンサード リンク
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