Sainsbury’s FD John Rogers has given a bullish interview to The Mail on Sunday declaring the supermarket would not follow rivals Tesco and Morrisons by closing stores. He claimed that the group was heading into Christmas with a “bounce in its step”. Rogers said with just two weeks trading left before Christmas he was “quietly confident”. “It has been incredibly competitive and with the rise of the discounters it is not going to get any less. We are not complacent, but if you look back, there is evidence to suggest we have some good momentum relative to our supermarket peers,” he said. “I’m optimistic about our ability to out-trade in this sector. I look back over the past 12 months at a time when many external observers were suggesting that our competition would revive and that we would suffer as a consequence, but we have actually stepped on again compared with the other major supermarkets.”
Asda CEO has written a similarly strident column for The Daily Mail in which he said the challenges retailers face would not be fixed overnight, but he added Asda was “building the strength to weather storm”. Clarke wrote: “My predictions for next year are that the sector will undergo a process of simplification as retailers look to adopt lower cost operating models, with simpler pricing but this should not be to the detriment of the choice, innovation and convenience that customers expect. “Online will continue to be a crucial battleground where value is king. I define value as a combination of price, quality and service. Those who can achieve this will be winners. Analysts predict that the discounters will continue to grow market share, but will only grow through new stores rather than sales in the longer term. For this reason, they should not become the main industry obsession when it comes to planning for the months ahead.”
The Independent and The Guardian this morning carry stories that UK Nurofen owner Reckitt Benckiser has admitted to “misleading” consumers over contents of painkillers. An Australian court ordered Reckitt to stop selling several versions of the drug that was identical to its standard ibuprofen pills, but almost twice as expensive.
Former Marks & Spencer boss Lord Stuart Rose has been appointed non-executive chairman of Time Out Market, the physical food hall of the magazine publisher (The Telegraph). He will oversee the expansion of the market concept, started in Portugal last year, to London and New York.
Britons spent £7.9bn in coffee shops this year, with sales across the market 10% higher than 12 months ago as “café culture tightened its clutch on the UK”, according to The Telegraph. The paper writes that almost four in 10 coffee shops are from the non-specialist sector as pubs and supermarkets jump on the bandwagon.
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