Asda boss Andy Clarke needs a Christmas miracle
The supermarket's sales are looking increasingly precarious.
It seems ‘Asda Price’ doesn’t cut it anymore. The supermarket, which vies with Sainsbury’s to be Britains’ second-biggest, is on a run of seriously bad performance and it’s by all accounts the fault of the rapidly growing discounters.
Yesterday the supermarket, a subsidiary of the US behemoth Walmart, announced that like-for-like sales had slipped 4.5% in the thirteen weeks to September 30. That’s little better than the 4.7% dip in its previous quarter, its worst in 50 years. It’s perhaps even more desperate than the 3.5% rout in total sales attributed to the grocer by the latest Kantar Worldpanel grocery figures, published yesterday.
The data paints a particularly bleak picture for the supermarket. All of its major rivals are struggling but it seems that none has been hit quite so hard by the rise of Aldi and Lidl, which Kantar says grew by 16.5% and 19% respectively in the period.
