The most crowded grocery retail markets are in Southern Africa. But after that, the results of our findings may surprise you.

We’ve been tracking grocery retail markets in Africa for a few years. We’ve tackled grocery retail market attractiveness in many ways, but haven’t had a deep dive into the underlying data to see which markets are becoming the most crowded in terms of the number and size of supermarket chains in them.

In order to look at market crowding we tracked nearly 500 grocery retail brands across 50 countries in Africa. We looked at the size of supermarket store networks, whether leading international retailers like Carrefour or Shoprite were present, and accounted for population size.

Note – we’re not looking at the market opportunity here. Most markets are crowded or uncrowded for good reason.

Some of the findings were unsurprising: the most competitive markets are all in Southern Africa: Botswana, South Africa, Namibia. Even Zimbabwe (#5). At the other end of the scale, we found the least crowded markets in Burkina Faso, Chad and also Sudan. For how long Sudan remains like this after US sanctions have been lifted is another matter.

Other findings may be more surprising: Angola, Cameroon, Côte d’Ivoire, Senegal all outrank Kenya on market crowding.

Is Kenya really less crowded than Angola or Cameroon? It’s an interesting question, so worth diving into the data again.

How crowded is Kenya?

Kenya has a number of large domestic supermarket chains and proved to be too much for Shoprite to consider entering in 2012/3. But in a population of nearly 50m people there is a single supermarket chain with more than 50 stores. That’s Tusky’s. Nakumatt – if it stays solvent – and Naivas both have more than 40 stores each.

Uchumi – if it stays solvent – has 21 stores. Chandarana has 13. Choppies has 11. Then there is a long tail of small domestic chains like Cleanshelf and Eastmatt with a handful of stores.

Bear in mind that Shoprite alone has more than 1,200 supermarkets just in South Africa.

Kenya’s grocery retail market isn’t crowded: three quarters of the country live in rural areas. Nairobi is quite crowded relative to the size of the modern trade. Two of its leading chains are on life support. When a whopper like Carrefour arrives with two large hypermarkets it is able to suck a lot of the oxygen from the grocery market.

The explosion of supermarket chains in Angola

Let’s turn our attention to Angola, a market with half as many people as Kenya. Domestic retail chain expansion has exploded, mostly in Luanda: Maxi, Kero, Casa dos Frescos, Mercadão, Nosso Super among others are all competing to build new and often bigger stores. Angola also boasts a national franchise network of nearly 250 local convenience stores.

Shoprite has quietly built a network of nearly 30 Angolan stores in what is a notoriously hard market to crack for international retailers. Last year Shoprite revealed that it planned to invest $572m on stores in the country. In February this year it revealed that sales in Angola had surged 155% on the year prior.

In Cameroon, Carrefour looms large

Alternatively, let us look at Cameroon. Cameroon’s population is half that of Kenya’s, and three quarters of the country lives in towns and cities.

In Cameroon the race to build store networks in Douala and Yaoundé is astonishing. Just a few years ago, Cameroon had only two supermarket chains of note: Casino (Mercure International) and Mahima (Choithrams). Since then Spar and Système U have opened new supermarkets and Carrefour has announced its intention to build six hypermarket complexes.

Carrefour has spurred unprecedented investment from domestic supermarket chains, some new, some old. All are working to a deadline of 2019 to bulk up before Carrefour opens. When it does, the grocery retail market in Cameroon will get a lot more crowded.

Key lessons

• There is a yawning gap in how crowded markets are between developed Southern African markets and the rest
• Kenya isn’t necessarily as crowded as popular opinion would have us believe
• Markets such as Angola and Cameroon are not as open as they might seem
• A lot has changed in the past 3 years, even while ‘Africa Rising’ has been on pause
• Obviously enough, most of the crowding is limited to the largest and wealthiest cities