Sainsbury’s saw sales grow 5.3% during the last quarter helped by its discount own label goods and enjoyed its “best ever Christmas performance”, the firm said this morning.
Chief executive Justin King said like-for-like sales for the 13 weeks to 3 January grew 4.5% and customer transactions increased to over 18 million a week.
In the seven days before Christmas, Sainsbury’s witnessed 22.6 million transactions, the supermarket revealed, despite “diluted” sales growth due to December’s VAT cut.
King said: “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.”
He cited the firm’s own label products, especially the cheaper ‘basics’ range, as well as the Switch and Save promotion, for contributing to some of the success.
King added: “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% year-on-year.”
Sainsbury’s results come in stark contrast to Marks & Spencer, which reported a 7.1% dip for the last quarter yesterday.
Seasonal campaigns for Halloween and Bonfire night also led to the strong sales performance, King said.
The retailer’s “wide customer base” should allow it to continue progressing in 2009, he said, despite an increasingly challenging economic climate.
Nielsen’s last set of supermarket share figures released before Christmas showed that Sainsbury’s boosted sales by 3.6% in the 12 weeks to 28 November 2008.
King highlighted the company’s “universal appeal” following a 3.9% rise in half-year sales when they were announced in November.
