The defacto interim chief executive of supermarket giant Asda Lord Stuart Rose has joined the chorus of senior retailers slamming the recent Budget as “unhelpful”, while being cautiously optimistic about Trump’s election win stimulating economic growth.
Business titan Rose took over the day-to-day running of Asda in mid-September after Mohsin Issa stepped away from the business he and his brother had bought in 2021.
Speaking to Retail Week this morning on the day Asda reported a 2.5% decline in total sales excluding fuel to £5.3bn and a 4.4% drop off in like-for-like sales in the third quarter, Rose said the business “has been through a hell of a lot of change over the last three years, which some people tend to forget”, and insisted Asda “needs to get back to basics” to turn its fortunes around.
In that time, Rose said Asda has introduced its new rewards app, invested in food quality and price and was continuing to build on its customer loyalty offering.
“We need to make sure that we have an impact on our customers and going back to the two or three core things that will make that difference,” Rose added. ”Giving our customers a great experience, investing in our stores, investing in availability, investing in price, and our customers are beginning to see some of the upside of that.”
While sales were down for the quarter, Asda said that across the three quarters of the financial year so far, total revenues have inched up 0.5% excluding fuel.
Rose confirmed the news this week that Asda had “sadly had to part company” with 475 of its staff as part of ongoing efforts to ”streamline our operations in the office”.
While Rose was positive about the coming golden quarter, saying it would be a time when customers would look to “celebrate”, he was less sanguine about the recent Budget.
“It’s unhelpful,” he said, of Labour’s move to increase employer’s national insurance contributions and to lower the threshold at which they start paying it from April next year. “Business has been clobbered. We’ve been clobbered by around £100m, which isn’t out of line with the sorts of numbers we’re hearing from other retailers.
“We’re digesting what that means, but it’ll be inflationary. But we’ll pass on as little as we need, as little as we possibly can [to the consumer] because we’re a competitive industry. But it’s a blow and it’s tough.”
However, he struck a more optimistic tone about the US election result and the return of President Trump. Despite some economists predicting a global downturn if Trump were to introduce the tariffs and mass deportations that he campaigned on, Rose was more upbeat.
“You’ve seen what the markets have done internationally,” he said. “The markets like it. At the end what we need not just globally, but here in the UK, is growth.”
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