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EXCLUSIVE INTERVIEW FROM PAGE 19 The last one would be more local shopping. There’s no doubt – and we’ve certainly been the beneficiary – that people have switched to shopping more locally to avoid going to busy, crowded, mall-based shops. Metcash posted positive results in its full year report. Can you comment on this growth for food, convenience and liquor sales? When we released our results, we wanted people to understand that this wasn’t just about the impact of COVID-19, because you can very easily say, ‘Well Metcash has done well and benefited as a result’. At the end of February, across all three businesses, we were actually having a pretty good year. We’re starting to see results come through from the initiatives we’ve been working on over the last two or three years, so that’s a validation that it’s working and we’re seeing growth. And of course, in March and April, the numbers were completely distorted. Customers have been coming back into stores to see the work that we’ve done, saying, ‘I haven’t been in the store for a few years, it’s actually quite nice now – the prices are better, the ranges are good, and it’s not nearly as crowded as the one I was going to at the mall’. And we’ve benefited as a result of that. What are some of the key challenges that continue to impact wholesale/ distribution, and what is Metcash’s role in addressing these? We’re a little over a year into the five- year business growth plan. In food, the overarching theme is: how do we help our retailers become more competitive, because if their sales grow, our sales grow? We’ve been refreshing stores, with about 40 per cent of the network refreshed now. That’s good progress and we have about 400 more stores that we want to refresh. We’re working with our suppliers to get better prices for retailers and be more competitive on their pricing. The exciting thing for us is we’ve launched online. We have to see how that goes over the next year or two. It wasn’t part of our longer term plan a year ago, but given what’s happened with COVID-19, we’re certainly looking at that. Liquor is a very steady business. It’s a mature and controlled licensed market, and we still see some really good opportunities to grow that business. Australian Liquor Marketers CEO Chris Baddock joined Metcash in July last year. His focus is on three things. One is to keep refreshing the stores, and we’ve seen good sales growth come out of the refreshes. Chris has a real focus on digital and data, and we know we’re behind there, so it’s a good opportunity for us to improve. We’ve launched an online platform, Shop MyLocal: we see a really big potential for that. The third area would be around private label growth. So, we under-index in private label. We recently acquired the private label brand portfolio of 75 brands from Kollaras and we’re looking to see how we accelerate the private label growth strategy. Hardware is a very good business for us. We’re clear number two in hardware. We have more of a trade-focus business than our competitors. The refreshes are undertaken through our Sapphire program to improve the quality of the store network. We’ve completed 90 and we’ve said we’re going to upgrade 200 stores. We’ve completed 19 trade-only stores but we’ve said that we’re going to do 40 of those. So, we’re going to double the number of trade-only stores. We’ve continued to strengthen our trade business through our ‘whole of house’ strategy, which is how we’re able to supply our retailers with more SUPA IGA Strathfieldsaye. 20 RETAIL WORLD AUG, 2020