LONDON :British retailer Marks & Spencer’s food business saw food sales increase 10.8 per cent over the 12 weeks to May 17 year-on-year despite the fallout from a cyberattack last month denting availability, industry data showed on Thursday.
Researcher NielsenIQ said M&S’ share of the UK grocery market rose 20 basis points to 3.8 per cent in the period year-on-year.
M&S’ sales growth did, however, slow from 14.7 per cent in NielsenIQ’s previous report.
As part of its management of the cyberattack, M&S stopped taking online clothing orders and also took other systems offline. That hit food availability and also resulted in higher waste and logistics costs.
Last week M&S said the attack would cost it about 300 million pounds ($404 million) in lost operating profit, with disruption to online services lasting probably until July.
Most of NIQ’s data broadly echoed the findings of rival researcher Kantar’s report on Wednesday, with robust sales growth from discounters Aldi and Lidl, market leader Tesco, number two Sainsbury’s and online supermarket Ocado.
However, M&S is not fully included in Kantar’s market share data set.
($1 = 0.7430 pounds)
