The Bookseller.com

12th May 2008

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Tesco sets £200m book sale target

09.05.08 Graeme Neill

Tesco has unveiled ambitious plans to almost double its book sales in three years to £200m, and is also moving to challenge Amazon online. "We are looking to match or better Amazon.co.uk on our key 5,000 lines by summer 2008," said buying manager for books Gaynor Allen. "If we had the same market share on Tesco.com as we did instore, we would have sold £26m worth of books last year instead of £3.5m. The current model doesn't deliver to its full potential."

The supermarket has appointed Hazel Powell as its commercial manager, tasking her with building its online books brand. Tesco will also launch a new unified website selling all Tesco's products from the same place in the next 12 months, and is investigating delivering books directly to supermarkets for customers to collect.

Last year, Tesco sold £107.2m worth of books, with growth of 16.6% in volume and 19.15% in value over 2006. The result gave it a market share of around 10% in volume terms.

The supermarket is now setting itself the target of £125m worth of book sales in 2008 as part of wider ambitious plans for its non-food business. Non-food sales grew from accounting for 5.8% of Tesco's business in 1999–2000 to 15.6% in 2007–08. Tesco is working towards non-food representing 20% (£8.3bn) of its business by 2011–12, of which £200m would be books.

Tesco revealed the figures to publishers at a presentation at Ponsbourne Park in Hertfordshire on Wednesday. Category manager David Cooke said the retailer would continue to be competitive on price, but would move to higher price points for some titles. "We actually can sell quality products at good value," he said.

Tesco will also roll out a children's book club to 415 stores from next Thursday. It follows the success of its adult book club with Random House, which since it launched in July 2007 has sold 250,000 copies of selected titles, with a value of approximately £900,000. Two Random House titles will be picked per month, one for boys and one for girls.

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