The Retail Association of Georgia says the country’s FMCG market is highly competitive, giving distributors the flexibility to choose alternative retail partners if the terms offered by a specific supermarket chain are unacceptable.
In a comment to BMG, the chairman of the association’s board Giorgi Khabashvili said that the market offers sufficient opportunities for distributors to cooperate with different retail networks or independent stores.
According to Khabashvili, the real size of Georgia’s fast-moving consumer goods (FMCG) retail market is estimated at 18–20 billion GEL. He noted that the Competition Agency’s assessment of 13.6 billion GEL only includes companies that are VAT payers, which does not fully reflect the entire market.
Khabashvili explained that even the largest supermarket chains hold a relatively small share of the total market. For example, if a major chain records annual sales of 500–700 million GEL or even up to 1 billion GEL, it still represents only about 4–5% of the overall market.
He added that such a structure indicates strong competition and a relatively open market, where suppliers who disagree with the terms of one retailer can easily shift their focus to other chains or independent stores. According to him, this level of competition is one of the key features of a free market environment, which is particularly evident in Georgia’s FMCG sector.
