Morrisons to open hundreds more convenience stores as 2,000 target revealed
Morrisons plans to open hundreds more convenience stores by next year, its chief executive has revealed.
The Yorkshire-based supermarket giant currently has more than 1,600 Morrisons Daily stores around the country and in a new trading update, CEO Rami Baitiéh said it now hopes to increase this figure to 2,000 by 2025.
The Morrisons Daily brand was launched in 2015 shortly after the sale of its M Local range of shops. In 2022, it took over collapsed retailer McColl’s as part of the expansion of its convenience store offer and earlier this year acquired 38 such shops in the Channel Islands from SandpiperCI.
Mr Baitiéh said: “Convenience remains an important and strongly growing channel for us.
"With the McColl’s conversion programme now complete and the recent acquisition of 38 stores in the Channel Islands, we have over 1,600 Morrisons Daily convenience stores across the country, about two thirds of which are wholly owned. With this strong growth trajectory we are now targeting a total of 2,000 convenience stores in 2025.”
The trading update, covering the Quarter 2 period from January 29 to April 28, said the wider Morrisons group had seen like-for-like sales increase by 4.1 per cent.
Bradford-based Morrisons, which was bought for £7 billion by US private equity company Clayton, Dubilier & Rice in 2021, also reported EBITDA profitability excluding its fuel business was up 16 per cent to £321m.
The company’s debt has been reduced by 35 per cent to £4bn from a peak of around £6.2bn, while the £2.5 billion sale of its petrol filling station business to MFG was completed earlier this year.
Mr Baitiéh said: “I am pleased with the overall performance of the business in the second quarter with supermarkets, convenience, wholesale and online all delivering growth and contributing to a 4.1 per cent increase in like-for-like sales.
“Over the last eight months we have listened carefully to over 340,000 customers, colleagues and suppliers and the insights from this exercise are helping to refine and shape the activity in all three pillars of our strategy: commercial excellence, operations optimisation and new value creation. It’s clear that availability and our loyalty scheme are the two areas our customers talk about the most and so we are focusing intensively on these areas.
“Our Aldi and Lidl Price Match, introduced in February, has had a great start and is giving customers increasing confidence in the competitiveness of our prices across the shop.”
He added there will be an increasing focus in getting customers to use its More Care loyalty programme.
“Customer reaction to the significant investments we have made in the More Card has been very positive.
"We now have over five million active customers, and transactions using the card have grown by around 35 per cent in the last eight months. We are now targeting 70 per cent of transactions to be through the More Card over the medium term.
“This summer we are celebrating 125 years since Sir Ken Morrison’s father established the very first Morrisons store. This important milestone is a great platform to remind customers of the timeless values that Sir Ken built into the company and how our Market Street counters and our 18 food making factories set Morrisons apart. Embracing, preserving and enhancing his legacy is the foundation for building the Morrisons of the future.”
Jo Goff, Chief Financial Officer, added: “This has been another solid quarter of progress with sales and volume improvements right across the business.
"Our debt has now reduced by over a third and we made further progress on our cost savings programme with £78m delivered in the quarter, taking the total since the start of this year to just over £450m, in line with our £700 million three year target.”