Asda is to cut 150 jobs across its Leeds head office, as it rushes to cut costs to fuel its turnaround plan.
All functions at Asda House are affected by the redundancies, including a number of senior buying manager roles following a restructure of its commercial buying team over the past month, The Grocer understands.
The supermarket notified colleagues of the proposed changes on Wednesday. Managers have been individually notifying affected colleagues throughout the morning, with the process wrapping up at midday.
Asda said the changes aimed to “create larger roles with greater spans of responsibility”. It would simplify teams and support improved decision-making, it said.
“We’ve made good progress since launching our Formula for Growth plan 18 months ago, re-establishing our low-price credentials, improving availability and building new partnerships,” an Asda spokesperson told The Grocer.
“At the same time, we are operating in a highly competitive market and know we need to be more consistent across all parts of the business,” they added.
“As we move into the next phase of our turnaround, we’re making changes to our Home Office teams to simplify how we’re organised and how teams work together day to day. This is about making Asda simpler and faster to run by reducing complexity, improving collaboration and enabling quicker, better decisions for our customers.”
Asda’s losses surged to nearly £1bn
It is the latest round of job cuts at Asda as pressure mounts on Allan Leighton to stay on top of Asda’s soaring debt interest costs and address its free-falling market share.
Asda’s losses surged to nearly £1bn last year, as a result of its price cut investment and fallout from its bungled Project Future decoupling from Walmart’s IT systems.
Online sales dropped by 8.1% as a result of the disruption, amid a wider 3.1% fall in like-for-like sales last year, according to annual accounts published last week.
Despite its total debt burden falling from £3.8bn to £3.1bn through refinancing, the sale and leaseback of stores and through the sale of Leon. However, Asda’s borrowing costs surged by 19.2% to £728m as a result.
The accounts also revealed that Asda had cut nearly 7,500 roles across the business last year in order to cut costs. It included nearly 1,000 roles across its George supply as a result of its outsourcing to DHL. Further roles left as a result of the Leon sale.
Since returning to the business in November 2024, Leighton has focused his strategy on restoring Asda’s price position over rivals, with the aim of being between 5%-10% cheaper than Asda’s traditional big four rivals. During Q1 results in May, he insisted that the turnaround plan was “making progress” after the rate of sales decline slowed.
However, Asda’s sales decline accelerated further in June, with take-home grocery sales down 3.6% year on year, according to the latest sales data from Worldpanel. Its market share slipped to 11.5%, down from 12.1% the previous year.
Last month, Asda chief customer officer Rachel Eyre unveiled a major customer experience drive aimed at encouraging customers to “take a second look” at Asda stores.
The supermarket has also announced a major partnership with Ocado to improve its online shopping fulfilment, as well as a major technology tie-up with Amazon to enhance its retail media offer.
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