(Repeat with corrected name spelling in last paragraph, penultimate sentence, "Mosa" rpt "Mosa.")

HAMBURG (dpa-AFX) - The Edeka group, Germany's largest retailer with more than 11,000 stores and about 409,000 employees, intends to stand firm in the dispute over pricing by brand-name manufacturers. The "greed" of international brand-name retailers is not yet abating, CEO Markus Mosa said Tuesday in Hamburg at the presentation of the annual financial statements. "And we can understand it even less than last year," as quite a few raw materials for detergents, for example, as well as wheat, oils and fats have become cheaper again. Mosa said there would be a solution sooner or later, but in months rather than weeks. Currently, he said, Edeka is increasingly offering market access to alternative suppliers and also increasing its own brands.

"We currently have 17 groups that do not supply us," Mosa said. He included consumer goods giants such as Procter & Gamble, Mars and Pepsi, as well as parts of Henkel, Schwartau and Unilever. "We're clearly headed in a way that the branded goods industry maximizes its results and prefers to forgo supply." Mosa spoke of significant double-digit gains for the groups. "With us, you can assume, over the big thumb, retailers are successful if they have more than a four percent return on sales."

Edeka itself had partially imposed an order freeze at four groups to increase the pressure, he said. However, because of the warehousing, this has not yet had any effect on the stock of goods in the stores, but is rather a warning shot. Mosa feels strengthened in his position by the investigation of the credit insurer Allianz-Trade presented on Monday. The had found that "excessive profit-taking" by food manufacturers had noticeably contributed to food inflation last year.

Mosa also criticized massive food speculation in this context. For example, he said, wheat prices exploded with the first shot in Ukraine. "I can't imagine that there was any crop there at the end of February last year. All I know is snow and deep frost." But he said he expects everything to return to normal soon. Freight rates for import containers from Asia, for example, have already dropped by almost 90 percent. In this case, the demand must be that the purchase prices also fall.

Although several groups have imposed a delivery stop and thus each of them is foregoing sales of several hundred million euros, the total sales in the Edeka group increased last year by about 5.6 percent or 3.5 billion euros to 66.2 billion euros, Mosa said. According to the data, the approximately 3,500 independent merchants of the cooperative organization generated around 36.5 billion euros in their stores. That was 1.8 billion euros more than in the previous year. In view of massively rising prices and high inflation, the Netto discount store in particular had made gains. According to the data, sales there rose by 1.1 billion to 15.8 billion euros.

Edeka did not provide any information on the profits of the independent retailers. Headquarters retained 395.7 million euros - 44.8 million more than the year before. The reason for the higher-than-forecast profit was the increase in gross profit at Netto and higher income from investments in associated companies. In terms of market share, Edeka lost 0.4 points, but remains the largest retailer in Germany with 21.7 percent. According to Mosa, the minus was largely offset by a 0.3-point gain to eight percent at Netto. This was followed by Rewe with 16.2 percent, Aldi with 15.4 percent and Lidl with 10.9 percent./klm/DP/men