Woolworths New Zealand has released its full year financial results for F24 with EBIT declining by a normalised 57.2% to NZ$108 million, reflecting the competitive trading environment and material wage costs. F24 sales increased 1.3% on a normalised basis.
Woolworths New Zealand Managing Director Spencer Sonn said: “Our overall financial performance reflects the very competitive trading environment we’re operating within as customers remain challenged as a result of elevated cost-of-living pressures. Lower sales, combined with our investments in lower prices for our customers and material wage costs to support our team, all had an impact on earnings in F24. Encouragingly, we saw improved trading in Q4 with items returning to growth.
“While it was a challenging year, I’m proud of the progress we’ve made on our multi-year transformation agenda, with customer metrics showing improvements in key areas including value, fresh fruit and vegetables and better shelf availability as a result of early progress on our transformation initiatives.
“Delivering value for our customers continues to be our priority and we know they need us to do more to help them find value across their whole shop. I’m delighted that we launched Everyday Rewards during the year, now with over 1.6 million active members, providing more benefits to our members. We also reset our key price mechanics, with more to do in F25.”
Key initiatives undertaken during the year to support customers and team include:
• Investing in local communities through the Woolworths Future Ferns netball programme, Growing for Good grants given to ten schools and the opening of two Mini Woolies to support disabled students
• Introducing new safety measures including the rollout of team safety cameras to all Woolworths stores
• Renewing and renovating 16 older stores to give our customers vastly better shopping experiences and we have more in the pipeline this year
• Continuing to grow our eCommerce network with Direct to Boot now available in 43 Woolworths stores
• We launched MILKRUN during the year and it is now available in 57 stores across 12 regions in New Zealand
Spencer Sonn added: “We’ve seen firsthand the effects of retail crime, and I’m proud of the progress we’ve made through our investment in new security measures to keep our team and customers safe.
“We are seeing signs of inflation moderating which will be a relief to our customers, with many fresh products cheaper now than they were this time last year, and we’ll continue to monitor our costs while delivering meaningful value to Kiwi shoppers.”
The full Woolworths Group F24 Profit Announcement can be found here.
A recent report from the New Zealand Institute of Economic Research, commissioned by Woolworths New Zealand, shows that Woolworths adds over $1.6 billion to New Zealand’s GDP every year. This can be found here.
