A story yesterday on SeekingAlpha.com concludes that Kroger can expect takeover offers in the near future, and that Safeway is also worthy of consideration.
Regarding Kroger, the nation’s largest retail supermarket chain, the article says “the company has delivered top-line growth every year since 1987, but is still cheaper than 99% of companies listed in the S&P 500 measured by the forward price-to-sales ratio.”
Kroger-branded food stores are generally located in the Midwest, South and Southeast, and other Kroger brands (Ralph’s, Food 4 Less, Tom Thumb, among others) can be found throughout the U.S.
As for Safeway, which owns the soon-to-be-extinct Genuardi’s chain, fourth quarter sales increased 6.2% compared to the same period one year ago, and the company experienced low inflation for 2011 as a whole, according to the story. The author pointed to a number of other factors that would be fairly interesting to a finance major, but not really to me. I got the overall drift, which is that Safeway is well-positioned and can be seen as having decent upside to a buyer.
Safeway is the second largest supermarket chain in the U.S., with about 80% of its stores in the western states.