By Christopher Daniel and Dr. Tony Hernandez

This report provides insight into the trends and strategies of Canada’s Top 124 retail corporations for Fiscal 2011. This eleventh edition of ‘Canada’s Leading Retailers’ is structured by the retail categories of the North American Industrial Classification System (NAICS) and reflects the CSCA’s on-going focus on corporate strategy. The report details the varying levels of corporate concentration across retail sectors in Canada, provides contrasts between indigenous and foreign retail strategies, and comments on the resulting impact upon the retail landscape. It provides profiles of the major retail corporations by sector with information on market share.

The report is made possible by the CSCA’s corporate data collection activities. The resulting data resource, the CSCA Leading Retail Chain Database, provides unique insight into the locational strategies of major retail chains operating across Canada. Through the longitudinal collection of such data the CSCA will continue to monitor, track and report on the changes in Canadian corporate concentration and retail store segmentation.

The CSCA would like to acknowledge the support of Environics Analytics, and their President, Jan Kestle, for providing access to Environic Analytics Demographic Estimates and Projections (DEP) data for use within this report (Table 2). The DEP data provides critical up-to-date demographic information (i.e., population and household counts, income estimates, amongst many other key variables) to gauge the size of the markets within which the selected leading retail chains operate. More information on DEP is available at www.environicsanalytics.ca.