Allan Leighton is a not a man to make excuses. But it’s hard not to assign a considerable portion of the blame for Asda’s recent struggles on its tumultuous, eye wateringly expensive Protect Future IT overhaul.

The delayed, nearly four-year tussle to decouple Asda’s critical IT systems from former owner Walmart has cost Asda almost £1bn, hampered availability and diverted much-needed investment away from its crumbling stores.

Leighton’s delight was palpable when, earlier this morning, he declared to journalists reporting Asda’s Q2 results that “literally as of last night, the Future rollout is complete”.

Asda’s new ESR system is now live in all stores and all but a couple of non-food depots, a total of 2,500 individual system changes in all. “We’ve been converting about fifty stores a week for the past 10 weeks,” Leighton said. “That’s about £2.5bn of annual sales every week.”

Nowhere to hide

Asda will continue to feel the after-effects for some time, with sales and availability expected to be disrupted for the remainder of the current quarter. As The Grocer reported earlier this month, suppliers have also been less than impressed by the chaos with which the initial switchover has been handled.

Friction is to be expected given the scale of the project – Asda has repeatedly claimed Project Future is the biggest IT project ever to be undertaken by any retailer in Europe. Leighton is “confident” that the majority of the issues will be resolved by the beginning of next quarter.

Read more: Asda falls £600m into the red amid turnaround battle

While no one at the now “totally green” Asda will be looking back on the past four years with anything but relief that it’s over, its completion brings a new pressure.

Without the distraction of Project Future to hide behind, we’ll see whether Leighton’s growth strategy truly has legs, and if it can deliver on his long-term promise to return Asda to its glory days.

Asda’s honest turnaround

Leighton would say there are plenty of positive signs in Asda’s latest performance update.

While sales continued to decline, the rate was considerably slower, with like-for-likes down 0.2% against a fall of 3.1% the previous quarter. Revenues were down 0.2% to £5.3bn. It’s Asda’s best quarterly performance since Q1 2024, and driven by solid performance at George clothing and its Asda Express stores, both of which have remained the jewels in the crown.

Availability – a common complaint at many Asda stores of late – was at an eight-year high of 96% after Asda diverted focus to removing the most crucial bottlenecks. The supermarket looks to be doubling down on that.

Leighton has made busting inflation a key part of the strategy, hoping to maintain Asda’s DNA as a “gatekeeper” on low prices. There were also plenty of signs that Rollback is starting to “bite”.

Roughly 14,000 products have been on Rollback so far, offering an average saving of 22%. Asda also regained its crown as the cheapest supermarket in the Grocer 33 tracker, followed up by six wins out of eight so far this year. In July, NIQ said Asda was finally showing “green shoots of recovery” according to its data, following last year’s £600m loss.

But just as Asda’s decline has been the result of a “long run of bad performance”, Leighton has always been honest that it will take “three to five years” to turn the Asda ship around. 

Its performance during the 10 months since he returned to the business − “Allan time” as he referred to it during a call with journalists this week − has been markedly improved, but there remain significant challenges.

“Green shoots” there may well be, but Asda remains a very leafy plant.

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