UK supermarket group Asda slumped to a near \u00a31 billion loss last year, reflecting executive chairman Allan Leighton’s push to cut prices in an effort to win back shoppers and a raft of one-off costs.<\/p>\n
Britain’s third-biggest grocer after Tesco and Sainsbury’s saw its pretax loss widen to \u00a3989m in 2025 from \u00a3599m in 2024, according to annual accounts filed today.<\/p>\n
Total sales, including fuel, fell 3.4% to \u00a325.9 billion.<\/p>\n
Leighton – who returned to Asda in November 2024, more than two decades after he served as CEO – had warned in March 2025 that his plan to be 5% to 10% cheaper than traditional rivals would “materially reduce” 2025 profit and said rebuilding Asda would take up to five years.<\/p>\n
The group is majority owned by private equity firm TDR Capital. Former owner Walmart still holds 10%.<\/p>\n
The pretax loss includes \u00a3656m of one-off costs, mainly comprised of \u00a3284m related to Asda’s troubled, but now complete, IT separation from Walmart and a \u00a3344m non-cash impairment after a revaluation of Asda’s property portfolio.<\/p>\n
“The reported loss does not reflect the underlying financial strength of the business and continued powerful cash generation,” a spokesperson for Asda said, noting the group had a strong balance sheet, with \u00a31.3 billion in cash and \u00a32.1 billion of total liquidity at the year end, and the majority of borrowings secured into the next decade.<\/p>\n
Net debt was \u00a33.1 billion, a reduction of \u00a3500m on the prior year.<\/p>\n
Asda had reported in March that underlying earnings for 2025, or adjusted EBITDA after rent, fell 33% to \u00a3764m.<\/p>\n
Last month, it reported another fall in quarterly underlying sales, though the pace of decline eased.<\/p>\n
UK industry data, also published last month, showed Asda continuing to lose market share.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"UK supermarket group Asda slumped to a near \u00a31 billion loss last year, reflecting executive chairman Allan Leighton’s…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":508710,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[5],"tags":[72,61,60],"class_list":["post-508709","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-business","tag-business","tag-ie","tag-ireland"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/508709","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=508709"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/508709\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/508710"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=508709"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=508709"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=508709"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}