Morrisons wants 2,000 convenience stores in 2025
The chief executive officer of Morrisons has said the retailer is aiming to reach 2,000 convenience stores in 2025.
The supermarket retailer – which now has over 1,600 stores under the Morrisons Daily fascia – said convenience “remains an important and strongly growing channel”.
This figure has been boosted following the conversion of all McColl’s stores to the Morrisons Daily brand, with the supermarket purchasing the convenience chain out of administration in 2022.
Morrisons also recently completed the acquisition of 38 convenience stores in the Channel Islands from franchise brand SandpiperCI.
This comes as the retailer delivered a trading update for the second quarter of the 2023/24 financial year, a period during which it recorded an increase in group like-for-like sales (excluding fuel) were up by 4.1%.
During the period, which covered January 29th to April 28th, the retailer recorded total sales (excluding fuel) of £3.8bn, a year-on-year increase of 3.7%.
Morrisons said it has made good progress across its three strategic pillars: commercial excellence, operations optimisation, and new value creation.
Jo Goff, chief financial officer of Morrisons, said: “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.”