Jan 10, 2017

Supermarkets offer a foretaste of full-year sales

Because UK supermarkets' Christmas sales now appear more correlated to their full-year financial performance. For investors in Wm Morrison - which has just reported its strongest festive sales growth in seven years - this is an encouraging trend, and one that has already led to its full-year revenue and profit guidance being raised. While the shift upmarket persists - and helped boost sales for Waitrose and Co-op both this Christmas and last - the general direction of other stores' festive sales continued for the whole year. Only Sainsbury looks set to buck the trend in 2016-17, as Kantar's estimate of a 0.1 per cent fall in Christmas sales is unlikely to dent a forecast full-year recovery. As for Lidl, its 7.5 per cent Christmas sales growth presages another full year of UK market share gains, but represents a slowdown from 2015's 18.5 per cent festive sales surge.

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