JSNSF - J Sainsbury plc (JSNSF) Q4 2025 Earnings Call Transcript
2025-04-18 00:02:20 ET
J Sainsbury plc (JSNSF)
Q4 2025 Earnings Conference Call
April 17, 2025 04:15 AM ET
Company Participants
Simon Roberts - Chief Executive Officer
Blathnaid Bergin - Chief Financial Officer
Conference Call Participants
Freddie Wild - Jefferies
Sreedhar Mahamkali - UBS
Rob Joyce - BNP Paribas
James Anstead - Barclays
Monique Pollard - Citigroup
William Woods - Bernstein
Manjari Dhar - RBC Capital Markets
Clive Black - Shore Capital Group
Karine Elias - Barclays
Presentation
Simon Roberts
Good morning, everyone, and welcome to our 2024/2025 Preliminary Results Presentation. Thank you for joining us today.
As usual, I will start with a brief introduction before handing over to Blathnaid, who will cover the financials. I will then share the detail on our progress we have made during this first year of our Next Level Strategy and the plans we have for the year ahead. Now as a reminder, this is the Next Level Sainsbury's plan we set out in February of last year. You will remember our refreshed purpose. We make good food, joyful, accessible and affordable for everyone, every day. And underpinning our purpose, here are our four strategic outcomes, which we set out to define this next phase of our growth.
Our purpose and outcomes are the driving force for the choices we make across the business and guide how we show up and deliver for all our stakeholders. First choice for food, we are bringing more of our food range to more customers in more locations, attracting more bigger basket primary shoppers and delivering further grocery volume share gains. Loyalty everyone loves, where we're making loyalty more personalized for our customers and investing to accelerate our market-leading retail media capabilities.
More Argos more often, where we're taking focused action to extend range, enhance digital capabilities and improve relevance to grow frequency and spend in Argos, whilst delivering further operating model efficiencies. And underpinning all of these outcomes is our plan to save and invest to win, delivering another GBP1 billion of structural cost savings and investing in our capabilities across technology, automation and infrastructure.
Now over the past four years, we've transformed our business. We've invested GBP1 billion in lowering our prices and now have the winning combination of value, quality and service in the market, a combination that our customers love. And we're obsessed with the consistency of how we show up for customers week-in, week-out. With food first and people first, our people are at the heart of delivering everything that we do. That's why we led the sector on pay in January for the third year in a row and why we've increased colleague pay by 58% since 2018.
We continue to invest in the quality and resilience of our supply chain through building long-term partnerships with our suppliers, ensuring leading availability for years to come. And we've built resilience and created sustainable competitive advantage across our customer offer, our operations and our technology platform. We are stronger, more agile, and we have the capabilities to win in this market. And these are not capabilities that you can build or deliver sustainably overnight. We've been making balanced choices since the start of our four-year turnaround. This discipline has got us to where we are now, and we will continue to guide our outcomes to deliver for all of our stakeholders going forward.
Now you've heard me talk before about the key factors that really influence where customers choose to do their grocery shopping, value, quality and service. Through focusing our GBP1 billion of price investment where it matters most for customers, they now know they can trust us to deliver consistently great value. And because of this, value perception continues to improve at a faster rate than our competitors. Our reputation for outstanding quality and innovation continues to strengthen, and we've reached record levels of customer satisfaction on availability over the last year, continuing to lead our key competitors on overall customer satisfaction too.
More customers are making Sainsbury's their first choice for food. Over the last four years, the number of primary customers, those doing the majority of their grocery shopping at Sainsbury's has increased by 18%. And so in the last year, we have delivered our biggest market-share gains in more than a decade. We promise this would feed through to profit leverage, and it has with Sainsbury's profit growth of over 15%.
This is supported by our industry-leading cost-savings program, where we are well on track having delivered GBP349 million of savings in this first year. And we have a clear line-of-sight through GBP1 billion of savings over the three years to March '27, and this will be a vital point of difference in the year ahead. We are also committed to improving returns. And so while we are spending more capital on growth and efficiency, the higher retail profit has fed through to an improved ROCE. And we're delivering higher cash returns to shareholders while keeping leverage comfortably in the middle of our target range....
J Sainsbury plc (JSNSF) Q4 2025 Earnings Call Transcript