Sarah Fawcett

Sales Momentum Building At Morrisons After Progress With Recovery Plan Morrisons has delivered another “solid quarter of progress” as new CEO Rami Baitiéh implements his recovery plan, which has focused on improving the chain’s product availability, loyalty scheme, and price competitiveness. In its second quarter to 28 April, group’s like-for-like sales up 4.1%, total sales up 3.7% to £3.8bn.,underlying EBITDA H1 as a whole up 16% to £321m. Morrisons also revealed the group’s debt down by 35% to £4.0bn from £6.2bn after acquisition by PE firm CD&R. The group completed £2.5bn sale of its petrol station business to MFG, and bought 38 Channel Islands convenience stores from SandpiperCI. McColl’s conversion programme concluded, now targeting 2,000 Morrisons Daily convenience stores in 2025, up from 1,600. “I am pleased with the overall performance of the business in the second quarter with supermarkets, convenience, wholesale and online all delivering growth,” said Baitiéh. “Over the last eight months, we have listened carefully to over 340,000 customers, colleagues and suppliers, and the insights from this exercise are helping to refine and shape the activity in all three pillars of our strategy: commercial excellence, operations optimisation and new value creation. It’s clear that availability and our loyalty scheme are the two areas our customers talk about the most and so we are focusing intensively on these areas.” Baitiéh noted that its Aldi and Lidl Price Match scheme introduced in February had given shoppers increasing confidence in the chain’s competitiveness. He also revealed that the investment made in its More Card loyalty scheme had been “very positive”, with over five million active members and transactions using the card growing by around 35% in the last eight months. Morrisons is now aiming for 70% of transactions to go through its More Card over the medium term, up from the current 50%. Chief Financial Officer Jo Goff concluded: “This has been another solid quarter of progress with sales and volume improvements right across the business. Our debt has now reduced by over a third, and we made further progress on our cost savings programme with £78m delivered in the quarter, taking the total since the start of this year to just over £450m, in line with our £700m three year target.” Currently celebrating 125 years since Sir Ken Morrison’s father established the first Morrisons store. Despite sales improvement in 12 months, Morrisons’ market share slipped from 8.8% to 8.7% over the year to 9 June 2024 [Kantar]. NamNews Implications: * Improvements patently taking place in terms of - product availability, - loyalty scheme - price competitiveness. - Debt reduction of 33% - EBITDA up 16% * i.e. key improvements for a PE financed company * Key that it soon results in growth of market share… * Watch this space! #Morrisons #GroceryMarketShare

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Morrisons raises freezer temperatures❄ Recent studies have shown that an increase of just three degrees in freezer temperatures across the supply chain will transform the global logistics landscape by cutting carbon emissions, saving energy and lowering costs. Read Here👇Ruth McDonald Thomas Eskesen Katherine Woodhouse #retailnews #morrisons #supermarkets

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Morrisons is trialling the personalised, AI-powered initiative, which rewards shoppers for purchasing particular brands they select from a list, something it says will provide value for both the consumer and brands https://lnkd.in/egX2BkZU

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Carbon reduction ideas are coming thick and fast, and retailers are jumping on them to reduce energy usage and support their net zero emissions targets. What does everyone think of The Move to -15°C coalition?

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