Supermarket Sainsbury’s has seen 10% fall in profits as first half sales were hit by pricing pressures. In the last quarter, the supermarket saw like-for-like sales fall 1% although underlying profits rose 2.1%.
Commenting on the Interim Results 2016, Mike Coupe, chief executive, said: "Two years ago we set out our strategy to make our customers' lives easier, offering great quality and service at fair prices, serving our customers whenever and wherever they want. We have made good progress delivering this in challenging market conditions.
"We have invested in the quality of our products while reducing prices on everyday items, delivering volume growth and outperforming the market in customer service and availability. To meet growing demand for home delivery groceries in London, we opened a new online fulfilment centre. By Christmas we will open 30 Argos digital stores and create a further 30 Argos digital collection points in our supermarkets.
"These will form part of a rollout of 200 new digital collection points where customers can collect Tu clothing, eBay and DPD parcels.
"We achieved like-for-like transaction growth across all our channels and remain on track to deliver our three-year £500 million cost saving programme by the end of 2017/18. We will also deliver £500 million of cost savings over three years from 2018/19. We continue to benefit from a strong balance sheet, with net debt reduced by £485 million from March 2016 to £1.3 billion and we are committed to paying an affordable dividend, fixed at 2.0 times cover for the full year. Consistent with our policy to pay an interim dividend of 30 per cent of the previous full year dividend, our interim dividend will be 3.6 pence per share."
