Sainsbury's beats Christmas trading predictions with 8.6 sales increase

A British supermarket group has announced that it beat predictions for its Christmas period.

Sainsbury’s, headquartered in London, saw like-for-like sales excluding fuel in the fifteen weeks to 2 January rise by 8.6 per cent.

The company, which also owns Argos, has now predicted that its year-end underlying profit will hit £330m in the financial year to March 2021, compared to last year’s £586m.

Simon Roberts, chief executive of J Sainsbury, commented: “As we enter our third phase of tighter restrictions and national lockdowns, my number one priority remains keeping our colleagues and customers safe.

“The last few months have been really tough for many people and we are all dealing with a lot of change and uncertainty again.

“Given these challenging circumstances, we really focused on doing the best possible job for our customers this Christmas.

“We made a strong start to delivering our Food First plan and we are also clear on the opportunities to further improve our offer as we look ahead for 2021.

“At Christmas we focused on offering our customers great prices, great quality and great service and I feel really proud that Sainsbury’s customer satisfaction scores were the highest ever in the key Christmas week.

“More customers bought their food online than ever before and we delivered 1.1 million orders in the ten days to Christmas, double the number of last year.

“Argos sales were up over eight per cent with Fast Track home delivery and Click & Collect beating expectations for Black Friday and Christmas.

“We remain focused on delivering the plan we outlined in November and look forward to providing a further update on early progress at our Preliminary Results in April.”

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