👉 Background: Coles is the second-largest supermarket in Australia with 28% market share - but still plays second fiddle to the heavyweight champ, Woolworths. Coles received a bit of supermarket-free-kick late last year after Woolies had a strike and its shelves barely had any stock.

‍👉 What happened: Since then, Coles has been living its best life. It saw its sales from its supermarket division jump 4.3% to $20.6 billion, while earnings also jumped 7% to nearly $1.1 billion. In fact, Coles reckons it generated $120 million in incremental sales from Woolies’ own goal.

👉 What else: The skill was being able to take advantage of the opportunity and pounce. Next minute: Coles' shares jumped over 4% on the news - hitting an all time record high.

What's the key learning?

💡One company's misfortune can be another's golden opportunity. Winning the supermarket wars hasn’t just been about having more stores or better products - it has also been about timing and responsiveness to a disaster.

💡Coles took advantage of the Woolies' opportunity by adding more staff to their stores and warehouses while working closely with its suppliers to increase product deliveries. By rapidly adapting to the situation, Coles turned a competitor’s misfortune into its own opportunity for growth.

💡Coles isn’t the first company to take advantage of a competitor’s mishap. In 2022, Optus suffered a major data breach affecting 9.8 million customers. In the following months, there were tens of thousands of customers of Optus customers that moved over to Telstra — and Telstra’s profits leapt 26%.