A strong focus on costs and more than encouraging initial results from Delhaize‘s future plan in Belgium helped Ahold Delhaize achieve sales growth and margin improvement in the second quarter.
Future plan bears fruit
Ahold Delhaize’s sales grew 0.7% to 22.3 billion euros in the second quarter of this year. Excluding some negative calendar effects, that would have been 1%, CEO Frans Muller said. The underlying operating margin improved slightly to 4.2%. In Europe, sales rose by 4.3% and the margin by 0.5 percentage points to 3.7%. In the US, sales were down 1.5%.
Among other things, the good initial results of Delhaize’s future plan in Belgium – as in the first quarter – further contributed to sales growth and margin improvement. Meanwhile, 108 of the 128 supermarkets have already been transferred to independent operators and Delhaize’s market share is already higher than before the announcement of the future plan in March last year, Muller said – without, however, giving concrete figures.
In the Netherlands, Albert Heijn is experiencing the impact of tobacco sales cessation: this will cost comparable shop sales in Europe some 2% to 3%, reports the retailer, which is confidently sticking to full-year profit forecasts, with a profit margin of at least 4%.
