Swedish retailer ICA Gruppen saw like-for-like sales grow by 10% across its largest store banner, Maxi ICA Stormarknad, in July, with the banner seeing reported sales up 11.6%.
Across all formats, like-for-like sales were up 5.7% (reported sales up 5.9%) for the month, to SEK 11.52 billion (€1.12 billion), with larger format stores performing stronger than its smaller outlets.
Its ICA Kvantum business saw like-for-like sales up 7.9% (reported sales up 8.5%), while ICA Supermarket was up 2.1% on a like-for-like basis (+0.9%).
Its ICA Nära proximity arm saw a like-for-like sales increase of 1.4% (reported sales up 1.2%).
Year To Date
In the period January to July 2020, Maxi ICA Stormarknad was also the strongest performer, with like-for-like sales up 9.9%, compared to +7.7% at ICA Kvantum, +6.5% at ICA Nära and +4.7% at ICA Supermarket.
Sales in the period January-July 2020 amounted to SEK 75.75 million (€7.36 billion), an increase of 7.5% compared with the previous year.
ICA said that it estimates the calendar effect for July to be +1.8%. As of 31 July 2020, the number of ICA stores was 1,269.
Grocery Confidence
Last month, a study by trade body Svensk Handel found that the grocery trade was hit hard by the coronavirus crisis, with confidence levels dropping by 2.6 points to 82.4 on an industry trade barometer.
"Even though more customers are returning to the stores, many retailers are still hard hit by the corona crisis," Svensk Handel's Karin Johansson said.
© 2020 European Supermarket Magazine – your source for the latest retail news. Article by Stephen Wynne-Jones. Click subscribe to sign up to ESM: The European Supermarket Magazine
