Concentration in Hungarian Food Retailing and Supplier-Retailer Relationships

The paper is a summary about the Hungarian retail sector based on the results of different research projects completed in the last five years. From all of these studies and of course the wide ranging domestic and international literature we had to conclude that the retailers have become more and more the exclusive owner of the information about the consumers and with this they become the new "captains" of the food chain. Thus we always started our research with gathering information about the situation of the Hungarian retail sector because we believed if we want to help those who try to adapt (the suppliers) then we have to know much more about those who dictate (the retailers). Analysing the concentration in company and not branch level we can say that the cumulated concentration line of the CR-10 companies are very similar to that of the processing and the retail sector. But there is a very important difference in the absolute numbers. This is a further sign of the size and power difference in favour of retailing