Advantages And Disadvantages Of Core-Mark Holding Company

Firm and Industry Analysis

Draft 1

Gordon Williford

For this assignment we are writing about the five forces and value drivers as they pertain to the food wholesale industry. The Food Wholesale industry buys their products from suppliers and distributes them to the convenience retail industry. By using the companies 10-k as well as Bloomberg, I will talk about the advantages and disadvantages that Core-Mark Holding Company (CORE), our group’s chosen company, faces in this industry.

Company Overview

Core-Mark Holding company, based out of San Francisco CA, is a wholesale company who sells products to convenient retail stores. Core-Mark according to their 10-k provides “sales, marketing, distribution and logistics services

In the food wholesale industry, it is easy to imitate your competitor’s products, meaning that your customer service is very important. Because it is so easy to imitate one another in this industry, a company’s reputation with its customers means everything to them. Maintaining long relationships with your customers is important to keep repeated business. One bad experience from a company can ruin your reputation and start a domino effect, leaving your company behind the competition. These companies need to have scale meaning that they sell many products for low profitability on each product to make revenue. Core-Marks primary competitors according to Bloomberg consist of; Sysco, Chefs Warehouse Inc., US Foods Holding Corp., Supervalu Inc., Calavo Growers Inc., and United Natural Foods Inc. If you go to Core-Marks 10-k although you can find a section that lists who they consider as their competition. The companies that Core-Mark listed as their competition are mainly small private companies. The reason for this is that the other large public companies such as Sysco don’t necessarily do the same things Core-Mark. They do very similar things but on a larger scale to different buyers. Sysco for instance sells mainly to food to restaurants and don’t have the revenue that Core-Mark does from cigarette sales. According to Core-Marks 10-k convenient stores used to go to suppliers who only sold them specific items such as all their dairy products. Core-Mark although sells the convenient stores a larger variety of items so that they don’t have to go to many different