Comment: Clarke pays price for failing to slow plummeting sales

LIKE a football manager who couldn’t buy a win, Asda’s chief executive Andy Clarke had been a man under pressure for some time.

He had tried, and for a while succeeded, in managing expectations – at the start of 2015 he warned of a volatile year ahead and last August he described it as “the worst storm in retail history”.

But knowing that it was going to be tough was one thing, finding a solution proved to be quite another. And today his bosses at Walmart’s head office in Arkansas decided it was time for someone else to have a go at reversing the retailer’s fortunes.

Big initiatives like click-and-collect hubs struggled to find enthusiastic customers and the Christmas push didn’t make a dent in the falling sales. At the same time Project Renewal, which launched last October and was a call-to-arms to focus on its core focus of selling to customers who visit its supermarkets, has struggled to have an impact at the tills.

Even softer like-for-like sales comparisons didn’t stem the haemorrhaging. Asda’s latest figures showed sales were down 5.7% in the first quarter of its 2017 financial year, which was on the back of a 3.9% drop a year earlier. At the time Mr Clarke described that quarter as “unprecedented”, now that figure would be described as respite.

In 2015, Asda lost £1bn in sales. But the decline continued.

Last month the latest market share figures from industry analysts Kantar showed Asda had reached its lowest point in more than 10 years, and down 10% in a little more than two years.

Although Walmart had been more interested in maintaining profits rather than market share, a point the parent company publicly acknowledged for the first time last month, this show of patience could not go on indefinitely.

Now they have decided to swap one Mr Clarke for another, and incoming chief executive Sean has much to do.

But after all the turmoil of the last 18 months, he wil have fewer resources and less time to do it.