Asda has made “real positive progress” with its turnaround plan, executive chairman Allan Leighton has declared, after posting its best quarterly performance since early 2024, and best availability for eight years.
While sales continued to decline during the second quarter of 2025, like-for-like sales were down by just 0.2%, compared with a 3.1% fall the previous quarter. Overall revenue decreased by 0.2% to £5.3bn during the period to 30 June.
It was a sign that the supermarket’s Formula For Growth plan, Rollback price cuts and store investment were “beginning to bite into the business” Leighton said. He predicted that Asda could be on track to “exit the year in like-for-like growth”.
Most critically, the grocer has now officially completed its tumultuous Project Future IT rollout, with the new system now live in all Asda stores and all but a handful of non-food depots.
Asda was now “totally green”, said Leighton, having previously “been operating in both green and blue”.
“Just operating in that one world brings a great deal of simplicity to business,” he said. “As always, when you do system changes of this scale and complexity, there’s some temporary disruption, which we’ve seen in some of the interfaces.”
The project to decouple Asda’s core IT systems from Walmart has cost more than £1bn to date. While Leighton conceded that availability and sales would continue to be affected for the remainder of the quarter, he said that if the impacts were stripped out “underlying like-for-like growth of the business would be positive”.
Fashion and convenience driving Asda improvement
Asda credited “strong momentum” in its George fashion business, which saw like-for-like sales rise 2.5% during the quarter. Asda’s Express convenience business had also “outperformed the market” with sales up 8.6% after finishing the integration of 469 sites acquired from Co-op and EG Group.
The supermarket is also kicking off a renewed rollout of standalone Asda Express stores, with plans to open more than 20 new stores in the space of a month from October.
In store, Asda has rolled out Rollback across half of its total 28,000 lines, with an average price reduction of 22%. Availability rose to 96% during the quarter, the “highest level in eight years”, after focusing on priority areas.
Hitting back at recent negative headlines and industry sales trackers that have shown Asda’s market share collapse, Leighton was defiant. “We love it when everybody writes us off,” he said.
“My Asda time started not 12 months ago, and during period of time we’ve just had our best quarter for five quarters. So I see it in a slightly different way.
“There are lots of reports on performance, not all of those cover what we are. Asda is a bit more than the supermarket. Supermarkets don’t have brands like George that are worth £2bn. Most supermarkets are closing their cafés, we’re opening them. Most of the supermarkets are closing their pizza servers, we are not. We have a massive pharmacy business, the second-largest optical business in the UK, standalone clothing stores, up to 400 Greggs, Costa and Subway concessions and we have 700 petrol filling stations. So that’s the way I look at it.
“I don’t look at any individual report that comes out. I just look at Asda as I know it − and the Asda that I know is recovering from a long run of bad performance and has just completed probably the biggest systems change that any retailer has gone through in Europe.”
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