CAPE TOWN: Sainsbury’s chief executive Mike Coupe has predicted discount supermarkets are set to gobble up nearly 15 percent of the market by 2022. He is the first boss of a major grocer to tell the City how much damage he believes Lidl and Aldi can inflict on the big four.
Tesco, Asda, Morrisons and Sainsbury’s have been losing thousands of customers to the German discounters and the exodus continued as market analyst Kantar Worldpanel revealed a sales drop at all four in the past 12 weeks – for only the fifth time since records began in 1994.
Coupe also called on whoever wins the election to tackle business rates reforms, calling the tax unfair to high-street retailers. Sainsbury’s revealed its first annual loss and fall in sales for a decade after a series of writedowns; it also slashed its dividend and warned that price deflation will last at least another year.
Management tried to paint a positive picture, but sales fell 0.7 percent to £23.78bn in the year to 14 March and a pretax profit of £898m last year swung to a £72m loss – thanks to £753m of one-off costs, including a £628m property writedown.
