Jan 20, 2017
M&S faces battle to regain clothing crown
Her distaste for M&S clothes testifies to the daunting task for Steve Rowe, the chief executive who has sworn to revive the clothing brand that, along with pallid skin and crooked teeth, once helped define what it looked like to be British. Most - along with Mr Rowe himself - insist it is too early to conclude that the M&S clothing business has finally broken out of a cycle of underperformance that has outlasted four chief executives. M&S can trace its relative decline to the introduction in 1995 of new trade rules that tore down the system of import quotas that had kept the world clothing market divided into national fiefdoms. While that will make M&S more competitive against its UK rivals, the globalisation of the apparel market has unleashed challengers of a kind Britain's largest clothing chain has never before encountered in its 132-year history: bigger ones. Sweden's H&M, which was level-pegging with M&S in 2004, now has 4,000 stores in 62 countries - compared with M&S's 1,380 mainly in the UK - and sells four times as much clothing as the UK group.
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