Tesco’s chamber of horrors

Long-time rumours of Tesco squeezing its suppliers to bolster profits have more than a grain of truth to them.

Tesco has "begun to resemble a retail chamber of horrors", said the FT's Jonathan Guthrie. The supermarket giant announced a fourth profit warning this week, wiping another 6% off the share price, which is now down 50% since the start of the year.

Profits for the year to February 2015 will not exceed £1.4bn, a reduction of around 30% on the previous estimate and a far cry from the £3.3bn reported last year. This is partly because the group has decided to jettison accounting practices, many relating to deals with suppliers that "artificially" elevated earnings.

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Andrew Van Sickle
Editor, MoneyWeek

Andrew is the editor of MoneyWeek magazine. He grew up in Vienna and studied at the University of St Andrews, where he gained a first-class MA in geography & international relations.

After graduating he began to contribute to the foreign page of The Week and soon afterwards joined MoneyWeek at its inception in October 2000. He helped Merryn Somerset Webb establish it as Britain’s best-selling financial magazine, contributing to every section of the publication and specialising in macroeconomics and stockmarkets, before going part-time.

His freelance projects have included a 2009 relaunch of The Pharma Letter, where he covered corporate news and political developments in the German pharmaceuticals market for two years, and a multiyear stint as deputy editor of the Barclays account at Redwood, a marketing agency.

Andrew has been editing MoneyWeek since 2018, and continues to specialise in investment and news in German-speaking countries owing to his fluent command of the language.