Sainsbury’s Reports Best Ever Christmas Performance

King: "We have continued to develop the Sainsbury's offer and demonstrated our ability to respond to rapidly changing customer needs."

08/01/09 UK retailer Sainsbury’s has reported that total sales for the third quarter were up 4.8 per cent (5.3 per cent excluding fuel). Like-for-like sales for third quarter were up 3.9 per cent (4.5 per cent excluding fuel). There was continued growth in customer numbers: 22.6 million customers at Christmas.

Justin King, chief executive, said: "Sainsbury's good trading performance has continued over the past 13 weeks resulting in like-for-like sales growth, excluding fuel, of 4.5 per cent, with our best ever Christmas performance completing a good overall third quarter. Adjusting for the negative impact of the change in the rate of VAT, like-for-like sales growth, excluding fuel, was 4.9 per cent. We reacted quickly to changing oil prices during the quarter, lowering the price of petrol and diesel. The lower prices compared to a year ago have diluted overall sales growth for the quarter.”

"We have continued to develop the Sainsbury's offer and demonstrated our ability to respond to rapidly changing customer needs. Sainsbury's offers great quality products at fair prices and appeals to the full range of customer needs and budgets. Customer transactions continued to grow over the quarter and now exceed 18 million a week with 22.6 million transactions in the seven days before Christmas.” "We once again improved customer service at Christmas. Product availability was strong and we had a great range of quality products and market-leading promotional offers. This resulted in our best ever Christmas performance including the company's busiest trading day on 23 December. We also delivered the highest ever trading performances for both Christmas Eve and New Year's Eve. Our online home delivery service delivered a record number of orders in the week before Christmas contributing to growth of 27 per cent for the full quarter.”

"We also traded well during the quarter's other key seasonal events, Bonfire night and Halloween, and our 'Switch and Save' campaign, which highlighted the outstanding quality credentials of our standard own-brand product range, contributed to good growth within this range. Our Sainsbury's 'basics', standard and 'Taste the difference' range hierarchy provides customers with a choice of quality products at great value with 'basics' continuing to show the highest growth with sales up over 40 per cent year-on-year.”

"Our non-food ranges continued to show good growth over the quarter. We had a strong non-food Christmas range and held a number of promotional events in the lead up to Christmas. This included our half price toy promotion in November when we sold nearly three million toys over the seven days of the event. We continue to be delighted with the performance of Tu, our own-brand clothing range, and are now the eighth largest retailer by volume in the UK clothing market with 2.3 per cent market share.”

"The economic environment remains particularly challenging and we expect this to continue in 2009, however our continued investment in price and promotions along with universal appeal and a wide customer base means we are well positioned to continue our good progress."