asda

Asda may have already hit its “nadir”, but its first-quarter figures provided little cause for comfort this week. Like-for-like sales slumped 5.7% in the first three months of the year, which constituted its seventh consecutive quarterly sales fall. The damage was not quite as bad as the 5.8% sales slump in its fourth quarter, but was some measure worse than the 4.7% drop in the second quarter to 30 June 2015, which CEO Andy Clarke described at the time as the retailer’s “nadir”.

Store traffic was down 5% and overall net sales were 3.6%, with Walmart’s CFO Brett Biggs blaming “fierce competition”. “Improvements in price and product availability throughout the quarter were not enough to overcome traffic and food volume declines in our large format stores.”

Phil Dorrell, partner at Retail Remedy, said: “If Asda was a ship it is one that is limping back to port having been torpedoed by smaller and more agile competition. Trying to maintain its position on price alone is simply not working, which it should have realised several quarters ago. ”

Conversely, the wider Walmart group saw its shares jump to open almost 8% up at $68.10 in New York on Thursday as it posted a 0.9% increase in first quarter revenues to $115.9bn, well ahead of analysts’ expectations.

Elsewhere, Fever-Tree jumped 18.9% to set a new all-time share price high of 711.2p on Thursday after issuing another earnings upgrade. The premium drinks mixer supplier said it had “outperformed expectations” in the first four months and now expected full-year performance to be “materially ahead of market expectations”.

Premier Foods is having a tougher time, despite the sales momentum it achieved in the fourth quarter. Premier shares initially spiked 3% to back above 40p, but the shares lost their lustre as the day went on and were down to 37.2p on Thursday morning - 40% down on the 62p it reached during the aborted McCormick takeover saga. Jefferies analyst Martin Deboo said the results signified Premier “putting down a marker of their confidence in an independent future.”

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