Tesco continues to show signs of a turnaround as overall grocery prices fall

Tesco has posted its strongest performance in over 18 months, with sales up by 1.1% in comparison to the previous year, according to the latest figures from Kantar Worldpanel.

The latest market share figures, for the 12 weeks ending 1 March 2015, also appear to show Tesco starting to halt its well publicised fall in market share.

Tesco saw its market share fall just 0.1 percentage points to 28.7% over the last 12 months.

Today’s news will have pleased Tesco boss Dave Lewis, with the figures following the positive momentum Tesco gained having returned to sales growth for the first time since 2014 in last month’s Kantar data.

Tesco’s positive performance, however, has negatively hit rival Asda, with the UK’s two biggest supermarkets competing for the same customers. Asda’s sales were down 2.1% for the latest period, while market share fell 0.5 percentage points to 17.0%. This made it the worst performing major supermarket group alongside The Co-operative.

Kantar_Worldpanel

“A combination of lower general inflation and the grocery price war has saved shoppers £400m in the past 12 weeks, with deflation driven to a record low of -1.6%,” said Fraser McKevitt, head of retail and consumer insight at Kantar Worldpanel.

“Among the big four supermarkets Tesco has been the standout retailer, with each focusing their efforts on simple price cuts rather than complicated ‘multibuy’ deals.”

Capping off the big four, Morrisons and Sainsbury’s both grew behind the market average with sales falling at respective rates of 0.4% and 0.5%.

Discounter Aldi continues to dominate, with market share hitting a record high of 5% and sales increasing by a whopping 19.3%. Lidl also performed robustly, with market share hitting 3.5% on sales up 13.6%.

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