Morrisons chief executive Dalton Philips has been fired and the superstore chain is looking for a replacement, to take over from him after the end of year results in March.
The chairman-elect, Andrew Higginson, commented “We need to return the business to growth. The board believes this is best done under new leadership.”
Morrisons’ sales have been sliding, even falling faster than Tesco on the run up to Christmas.
In the six weeks leading up to 04 January, sales at Morrisons, excluding fuel sales, fell by 3.1%.
In further attempts to save money, the supermarket chain will see the closure of 10 loss-making stores across the country by 2016.
Philips was under pressure in his position because of the continued failure of Morrisons to regain market share, especially from the discount stores.
In addition, Morrisons has fallen way behind the other big stores in terms of having an online presence and convenience stores situated more locally to people.
It is possibly because of this that they are beginning to struggle as much as they are.
All the big four stores, Tesco, Asda, Sainsburys and Morrisons lost market share over Christmas, whereas Waitrose, Aldi and Lidl all managed to gain ground, according to the Kantar Worldpanel.
The issues the supermarkets are facing by no means ended with last year, and they are going to have to keep battling in order to stay on their feet throughout 2015.
