Cat Fight in the Pet Food Industry

Cat Fight in the Pet Food Industry (A)

1. What is your assessment of multi-market competition among players in the pet food industry?

Pet food industry is basically divided into six sub-markets three each in dog and cat food: Dry, Canned and Moist. Pet food industry is fairly mature with stagnant growth and thus there is huge competition among firms. Firms are more or less competing on price. Grocery stores account for almost all the pet food sales and are highly important for them being the second largest line. Since there is limited shelf space, manufacturers have to fight for it for which they are spending huge amount of money on marketing their products which eventually results in shrinking of their margins. Also players like Ralston have more power than smaller players when it comes to getting the shelf space as the stores doesn’t want to lose the biggest player.

There are seven major players who have more than two-third of the market share. All of these players have placed themselves majorly in one or two markets, for e.g. the biggest player Ralston is generating 75% of its total pet food sales from dry cat and dog food, whereas Kal Kan is generating the same proportion of its total pet food sales from canned cat and dog food.

Players are moving away from the market in which they are facing fierce completion from a major player and instead putting their resources in markets where they can gain substantial foothold. For e.g. Carnation has moved away from the dry dog food segment as it was facing fierce competition from the market leader Ralston who is controlling the price in that segment. Carnation is thus putting more efforts in gaining market share from other segments like canned cat food by introducing new brands.

Dry food segment in both cat and dog categories is completely dominated by Ralston with 52% and 40% market share respectively whereas in canned food segment there is no single major player and the market is divided among three-four firms. Thus Ralston is able to put more pressure on other smaller firms like Anderson-Clayton who is generating almost half of its revenue from the dry food segment.