Profit in the 21st Century. Exemplified by the Orange Giant Migros (PDF)

Seminar paper from the year 2021 in the subject Business economics - Business Management, Corporate Governance, grade: 2.0, University of Geneva (Paul Bairoch Institute of Economic History), language: English, abstract: Global retail business is known for rough competition, low salaries, bad working conditions and big players. Two of these big players, Aldi and Lidl, entered the Swiss market in the last two decades, but Migros and Coop notably still made up about 77% of the retail market share in 2018.They though lost more market share over time when the food market is considered independently. The author of this paper was interested how Migros and Coop with the legal form of cooperatives behave in this competitive market.

The methodology of this research was limited by the availability of data (and the scope of the work). For Aldi and Lidl for example, the two main capitalist competitors of Migros, there is basically no data available; except for minimum wages where they are leading in Switzerland.

This research only delivers pieces to the role of profit for Migros. It focuses on the head organisation, while the 10 regional cooperatives can attribute a different role to profit. It considers what priority Migros attributes to different revenue and cost factors, where qualitative or quantitative data are available. It additionally includes some major critiques of Migros.