Asda Sales Exceeds Forecast

Wed, 21 Feb 2007
 
Get the latest prices, codes, vouchers & deals fortnightly.
ASDA, the UK’s second-largest supermarket chain, saw its sales for 2006 exceed forecasts thanks to better services, pricing, and the introduction of premium food lines.

Details of Asda's performance emerged as Wal-Mart published fourth-quarter results in the US.

Investment was heavily put in to help improve a number of departments such as, its Organic range, its premium clothing range, and increasing the quality of its fresh foods.

Mike Duke, Wal-Mart International’s vice chairman said, "We ended the year with the strongest comparative sales growth in over two years, exceeding business plan sales for the full year."

"We are very encouraged by this trend as we have seen positive momentum in both customer traffic and average ticket for the year, as sales were up in the mid-single digits, and profit increased slightly," Duke added.

The group said it now had a million more regular shoppers over last year, while it had also seen an increase in average spend per customer, despite cutting prices .

The food retailer’s resurgence comes under the leadership of Chief Executive Andy Bond, who since joining the company in April 2005, has help broaden the focus of the store beyond low price products.

Andy Bond is also helping to develop its online business, with more than 3,500 items now available online, and added that during the next 2-3 years, he expected Asda to make around 500 million pounds of sales from its online service .

Asda extended its share of the grocery market to 16.6 percent in the 3 months to December 31, while leaders Tesco had its share slightly reduced to 31.4 per cent.

Sales at the company account for around 50 per cent of Wal-Mart's international sales, which reached $77.1 billion (£39.4 billion) by the end of 2006.

Link to this page

Copy and Paste the following HTML into your page.