• State-wide March increases were 14.4%
• The top gainers include:
  1. Apple Valley +1431.6%
  2. Mona +96.1%
  3. Herriman +64.0%
  4. Saratoga Springs +60.3%
  5. Myton +59.1%
  6. Scipio +50.7%
  7. Cedar Hills +46.8%
• The “bottom losers” include:
  1. Lyman - 84.8%
  2. Vineyard -38.7%
  3. Cedar Fort -33.3%
  4. Milford -23.0%

The US has been knocked off the top spot in a closely watched annual ranking of competitiveness, falling to sixth place while being overtaken by Switzerland, three Nordic countries and Singapore.

Growing economic imbalances and a relative lack of efficiency and transparency in US public institutions marked the country down in this year’s league table by the World Economic Forum. Also falling fast in the table was France, which declined from 12th spot to 18th, on the back of relatively weak scores for its macroeconomy, its institutions and the efficiency of its markets.

The WEF’s ranking is one of the more significant measurements of countries’ economic potential since it aggregates an extensive number of different indicators to arrive at its overall score.

The ranking had been heavily revised for 2006- 07, the WEF said, incorporating many new indicators of competitiveness and improving its accuracy as a guide to the medium and long-term economic performance of different countries.

But small changes in the position in the league, such as Britain’s decline from ninth to 10th, do not reflect a serious worsening of competitiveness, since the difference in countries ranked close to each other is minor.

They are extremely sensitive to the weight given to different criteria by the Swiss-based think-tank.

Augusto Lopez-Claros, the lead author of the WEF’s competitiveness index, said the rankings were most useful in spotting big changes in countries’ overall scores and identifying trends over time.

Even though Swiss economic performance has been far from stellar in recent years, with some of the lowest growth rates in Europe, the WEF justified the country’s ranking at the top of the table as reflecting “a combination of a world class capacity for innovation and a highly sophisticated business culture”.

Source: The Financial Times Limited 2006

When U.K. supermarket operator Tesco PLC announced in February that it would invest $472 million a year to establish a beachhead in the U.S., it tried to allay fears that it would further complicate the Darwinian struggle in the supermarket business. Instead, company officials said, their U.S. efforts would center on Express stores, which average between 2,000 and 3,000 square feet in size.

But when the notoriously secretive company signed its first U.S. lease last week it turned out to be a supermarket site--a 32,500-square-foot former Albertsons in Glassell Park, Calif. And, California brokers say, it is in the market for more.

The Glassell park space is in line with Tesco’s standard supermarket format, which has floor plates greater than 30,000 square feet and offers both groceries and a selection of non-food goods, such as health and beauty products, electronics, clothing, stationary, furniture and seasonal items like barbecue grills. Tesco officials declined to comment on their U.S. strategy, saying that they wanted their customers to be the first to learn about their stores.

“We have two or three clients who are negotiating with them right now and they are very aggressive,” MacLellan says. “I’ve been told that the spaces they are looking at are 15,000 square feet to 30,000 square feet and there are a number of former Albertson’s locations in the market, so I think Tesco is going directly to a lot of those owners.”

Another sign of Tesco’s growing ambitions: The company is building an 88.4-acre warehouse/distribution center at Meridian Business Park on Highway 86 in TK, Calif. that is expected to open by mid-2007.

“This is a highly desirable property; one of the more advantageous things about it is that you do not have a lot of retail availability in that market,” Heslin says. “And the community is ethnically diverse, with middle- to upper-middle income. It’s a very stable and desirable market, with very minimal population growth – less than one percent a year.”

Tesco is the fourth largest retailer in the world and operates more than 2,500 stores in 13 countries, but this is the fist time in its 97-year history that it has attempted to penetrate the U.S. market. CEO Terry Leahy told British papers earlier this year that Tesco did not previously have enough insight into the habits of American consumers to take such a big risk.

According to the London Times, last year, to prepare itself for entry into the U.S., Tesco dispatched 50 senior directors and researchers to live with California families for two weeks and study their eating and shopping habits. The families, recruited by a market research firm, were not aware of their guests’ true identity. The company also tested the market’s waters with a dummy store at a warehouse property in Santa Monica, Calif., allowing more than 200 focus groups to sample its products and provide feedback on what would sell in the U.S.

Source: Retail Traffic