Morrisons reports strongest sale results in seven years

Morrisons has reported a 2.9% increase in like-for-like sales over the Christmas period, marking the supermarket chain’s strongest performance for seven years.

Throughout the nine weeks to 1st January, the Bradford-based supermarket chain said that fruit & veg, together with beers, wines and spirits, ‘Best’ and its Nutmeg clothing range all performed well.

Morrisons now expects underlying pre-tax profits for 2016/17 to be in the range £330m to £340m, which is ahead of the market consensus.

Total sales were also up 2.0% excluding fuel, or 4.0% including fuel, despite the continuing impact of store closures. Like-for-like transaction growth also saw a 5.2% increase year-on-year during the period.

In addition, in recent months a new automated ordering system has been introduced into all stores in Grocery and many Fresh categories. The system is capital light, utilising cloud technology and store-specific historic sales data to forecast stock requirements.

David Potts, chief executive, said: “This Christmas we made further improvements to the customer shopping trip. We stocked more of what our customers wanted to buy, more tills were open more often, and product availability improved as over half of sales went through our new ordering system. Both like-for-like and total sales grew, which was very encouraging.

“Eighteen months ago I said that this would be a colleague-led turnaround, and our improving performance is entirely due to the continuing hard work of the Morrisons team of food makers and shopkeepers.”

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