By Christopher Daniel and Dr. Tony Hernandez

This report provides insight into the trends and strategies of Canada's Top 95 retail corporations for Fiscal 2004.  The research reflects the CSCA's on-going focus on corporate strategy, providing an update to the findings reported in earlier editions.  A key change to this fourth edition of 'Canada's Leading Retailers' is in the reporting of retail sales by North American Industrial Classification System (NAICS) codes, as opposed to the Standard Industrial Classification (SIC) codes used in previous editions.  The implications of this change in reporting mechanism are detailed within the report.

The report highlights continued corporate concentration 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.  The resulting data resource, the CSCA Corporate 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.