Ocado: lockdown proves lucrative for online grocer

(Image credit: © PAUL ELLIS/AFP via Getty Images)

published 16 July 2020

Online retailer Ocado has declared that it has seen “unprecedented demand” for online grocery shopping in the UK “with a 27% leap in sales over the last six months”, says Jim Armitage in the Evening Standard. Ocado’s CEO, Tim Steiner, has said that the firm has not only seen “years of growth” in the online grocery market condensed into a “matter of months”, but he also predicts that consumers “won’t be going back” to shopping in physical stores.

Ocado has clearly done well from the “exceptional trading conditions”, with sales up by 40% year-on-year at the end of the reporting period, says Andrea Felsted on Bloomberg. However, its shortage of capacity “prevented it from fully capturing demand” at the peak of the crisis, while the online arms of traditional retailers have exploited their “vast store networks” by adding more delivery vans. Ocado therefore needs to invest more in infrastructure to ensure “it gets its share of the growing online grocery market rather than let it slip to the incumbent supermarkets”.

It’s true that Ocado’s UK sales growth was less than that reported by mainstream supermarkets, says Jonathan Eley in the Financial Times. Still, Ocado’s management argues that the “store-pick model” used by supermarkets has “structurally weaker profit margins” compared with Ocado’s “centralised warehouse model”. In any case, since Ocado has always found it “easier to poach” customers from supermarkets than find them elsewhere, the company will eventually benefit from the expansion of capacity at Tesco and Sainsbury’s.

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Matthew graduated from the University of Durham in 2004; he then gained an MSc, followed by a PhD at the London School of Economics.

He has previously written for a wide range of publications, including the Guardian and the Economist, and also helped to run a newsletter on terrorism. He has spent time at Lehman Brothers, Citigroup and the consultancy Lombard Street Research.

Matthew is the author of Superinvestors: Lessons from the greatest investors in history, published by Harriman House, which has been translated into several languages. His second book, Investing Explained: The Accessible Guide to Building an Investment Portfolio, is published by Kogan Page.

As senior writer, he writes the shares and politics & economics pages, as well as weekly Blowing It and Great Frauds in History columns He also writes a fortnightly reviews page and trading tips, as well as regular cover stories and multi-page investment focus features.

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