Russian retailer Lenta has announced like-for-like sales growth of 3.5% in its second-quarter financial results.
Total sales for the period ending 30 June rose by 16.6%, to RUB 99.8 billion – an increase of 14.2% from the same period in 2017.
The retailer also opened seven supermarkets overall and closed one hypermarket. The group's current store count, as of the end of the quarter, is 346, comprised of 113 supermarkets and 233 hypermarkets. As such, its total sales space received a boost of 19.6%, to 1.4 million square metres.
The company did not break into any new markets during the second financial quarter, remaining present in 84 cities throughout Russia.
H1 Highlights
Highlights in the first half included a total sales increase of just over 18%, rising to RUB 193.2 billion. Like-for-like sales grew at a rate of 4.8%, compared to H1 2017.
A total of two new hypermarkets and 17 supermarkets were launched during the first half of the financial year, while one supermarket was shuttered.
One milestone was the retailer's co-branded loyalty programme with financial institution Raiffeisenbank, which merged the existing Lenta loyalty programme benefits with bonus cash-bank points. The programme boasted 13.4 million members as of the end of Q2, with 96% of transactions being made via card during the financial period.
Improving Efficiency And Creating Value
Lenta’s CEO, Jan Dunning, commented, "Lenta continues to deliver rapid growth, with sales up by 16.6% in the second quarter of 2018, despite the challenging market environment.
"Like-for-like traffic growth accelerated during the quarter, but this was offset by slowing basket growth due, in part, to a different mix of promotions compared to the previous year and the effect of the World Cup on shopping habits, which helped our supermarkets, but negatively affected our hypermarkets," Dunning added.
"We are especially pleased with the significant improvement in like-for-like sales in our supermarket format, which benefitted from changes in our offer launched earlier this year," he furthered.
Dunning said that the retailer planned to initiate a series of projects to improve the customer offer and further drive sales. He added that while chances for growth "remained plentiful", the retailer's focus is on improving efficiency in existing operations and creating "shareholder value".
© 2018 European Supermarket Magazine – your source for the latest retail news. Article by Karen Henderson. Click subscribe to sign up to ESM: European Supermarket Magazine.
