Nearly 14 months after it made its initial bid, in January 2003, Morrisons has completed a £3bn ($5.2bn) takeover of rival supermarket chain Safeway.
This finally sees a climax to a hard-fought and long-running acquisition struggle, one of the most high-profile in UK commerce.
Bradford-based Morrisons sparked the battle for Safeway last year with a £2.9 billion offer for the firm.
Morrisons claimed victory after the government’s Competition Commission ruled against rival bids from Britain's three leading supermarket chains - Tesco, Asda and Sainsbury's. An offer from entrepreneur Philip Green was also turned down.
Morrisons will now hold a significantly bigger slice of the market in southern England and be in a position to add to the pressure on Sainsbury's by vying for third place in the UK supermarket rankings.
The enlarged group will operate more than 550 stores, and plans are already in place to rebrand many of the larger Safeway stores as Morrisons.
The group is also considering converting nearly 180 medium size Safeway stores into a "Morrisons Compact" brand, to challenge the likes of Tesco and Sainsburys which operate smaller branded town centre outlets.
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