Study Methodology and Data Sources

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Companies are included in the Top 250 Global Powers of Retailing list based on their non-auto retail sales for fiscal year 2008 (encompasses fiscal years ended through June 2009).

A number of sources were consulted to develop the Top 250 list. The principal data sources for financial and other company information were annual reports, SEC filings, and information found in companies’ press releases and fact sheets or on their websites. If company-issued information was not available, other public-domain sources were used, including trade journal estimates, industry analyst reports and various business information databases.

Much of the data for non-U.S. food retailers was provided by Planet Retail. Planet Retail, a leading provider of online retail intelligence, offers industry news, analysis, and digital media to decision-makers across all sectors. Covering over 1,800 grocery retailers and 4,000 banner operations in over 130 countries, Planet Retail has offices in London, Frankfurt and Tokyo. For more information please visit www.planetretail.net.

Group Sales reflect the consolidated net sales of a retailer’s parent company, whether or not that company itself is primarily a retailer. Similarly, the income/loss figure also reflects the results of the parent company organization.

The Retail Sales figures in this report reflect only the retail portion of the company’s consolidated net sales. As a result, they may reflect adjustments to reported sales figures to exclude non-retail operations. Retail Sales exclude separate food service/restaurant operations and wholesale or other business-to-business revenue (except where such sales are made from retail stores) where it was possible to break them out.

Sales figures do not include the retail banner sales of franchised, licensed or independent cooperative member stores; they do include royalties and franchising or licensing fees. Group Sales include wholesale sales to such networked operations – both member stores and other supplied stores. Sales figures do not include operations in which the company has only a minority interest.

In order to provide a common base from which to rank companies by their retail sales results, fiscal year 2008 sales (and profits) for non-U.S. companies were converted to U.S. dollars; exchange rates, therefore, have an impact on the results. OANDA.com is the source for the exchange rates. The average daily exchange rate corresponding to each company’s fiscal year was used to convert that company’s results to U.S. dollars. The 2003-2008 compound annual growth rate (CAGR) for Retail Sales, however, was calculated in each company’s local currency.

Group Financial Results This report uses sales-weighted composites rather than simple arithmetic averages as the primary measure for understanding group financial results. Therefore, results of larger companies contribute more to the composite than do results of smaller companies. Because the data has been converted to U.S. dollars for ranking purposes and to facilitate comparison among groups, composite growth rates also have been adjusted to correct for currency movement. While these composite results generally behave in a similar fashion to arithmetic averages, they provide better representative values for benchmarking purposes.

Group financial results are based only on companies with data. Not all data elements were available for all companies.

It should also be noted that the financial information used for each company in a given year is accurate as of the date the financial report was originally issued. Although a company may have restated prior-year results to reflect a change in its operations or as a result of an accounting change, such restatements are not reflected in this data.

This study is not an accounting report. It is intended to provide an accurate reflection of market dynamics and their impact on the structure of the retailing industry over a period of time. As a result of these factors, growth rates for individual companies may not correspond to other published results.