Could Morrisons Be An Amazon Takeover Target?

By | 01/08/2019

As we all know, Amazon in the UK is getting heavily into the food supply market. Did you know one of their core partners is Morrisons who have vertically integrated back end services like abattoirs and farms so they can own the end to end process (from farm to fork)?

Their (Morrisons) Christmas results show very poor growth in retail but excellent growth in b2b – and guess what… b2b is Amazon buying from them.

What we are very interested in is that Amazon have only just started in the UK and own a tiny % of the market, yet it has accounted for 3% of the Q4 results for Morrisons, this bodes well for Morrisons future growth and would make Morrisons look like a strategic Buy for Amazon. Below is what Morrisons released:

Release date: 8 January 2019
A fourth consecutive Christmas of growth
For the nine weeks to 6 January, Group like-for-like* (LFL) sales excluding fuel were up 3.6%, comprising contributions from retail of 0.6% and wholesale of 3.0%. Group LFL including fuel was up 3.4%. Total sales* were up 4.0% excluding fuel (3.8% including fuel).

As has been widely reported, there was a change in consumer behaviour during the period. Morrisons performed well, sustaining a strong offer and trading the business hard for customers. We were again more competitive, with the price of our basket of key Christmas items the same as last year.

Customer satisfaction increased significantly. It is an important measure of our turnaround progress, especially during the busiest weeks ahead of Christmas and New Year. The strongest areas of improvement were colleague friendliness and checkout experience, which was thanks to the continued hard work and dedication of our team of food makers and shopkeepers.

David Potts, Chief Executive, said:
“This is Morrisons fourth consecutive Christmas of like for like sales growth during the turnaround. Our performance shows colleagues are listening hard and responding to customers, providing consistently great value and good quality when it matters most. I would once again like to thank the whole Morrisons team for what they continue to do for our customers.

“Morrisons is well set to keep improving the shopping trip and become more and more relevant for
more customers”.

Outlook:
Our 2018/19 year-end expectations are unchanged.