M&S cyberattack boosted rivals’ fashion sales – report

As the cyberattack crippled M&S’s webstore in late spring and early summer, the retailer’s fashion peers in the UK saw their fashion sales rising, the latest figures from analysts at Kantar show.

A report in The Guardian said retailers including Next, Zara and H&M all benefited from M&S customers being unable to order online.

The M&S webstore usually accounts for around a third of its fashion and homewares sales but the retailer stopped taking online orders for seven weeks as it battled the cyberattack impact.

Kantar’s figures show M&S clothing sales falling by a fifth year on year in the four weeks to 25 May having jumped in double digits in the previous three months, illustrating both how M&S’s recovery was going from strength to strength and also how devastating the cyberattack was.

M&S stopping webstore sales on 25 April (they restarted on 10 June) meant it missed out on rising sales of summer clothing as the UK weather warmed up.

Industry-wide, sales growth jumped to 4% in the four weeks to 25 may having been just 1% in the previous four weeks.

The report about Kantar’s figures also said analysts at Jefferies compared M&S’s performance with its closest rivals over two 12-week periods. In the three months to 25 May the retailer’s sales growth was just 1% compared to 11.5% in the three months to mid-April. At Next, growth for the earlier period was 1.6% but jumped to 4.8% in the later period. 

They also said both Zara and H&M saw strong uplifts. It’s unclear how much of those uplifts was accounted for by the retailers benefiting from M&S’s problems and how much was due to consumers generally buying more summer fashion.

But M&S did say that its fashion sales in-store were strong as shoppers sought out products that they couldn’t order online. The company said it did well here “across all fashion categories and particularly womenswear”. And it retained its top spot as Britain’s biggest fashion retailer by value.

Interestingly too, among its rivals, the figures show that Primark didn’t get a boost from the M&S webstore closure. Although it has rolled out Click & Collect to its UK stores, it’s still essentially a stores-only operation and the figures showed its sales growth actually narrowed to 2.7% from 3.1%.

It’s not yet known how much excess inventory M&S will be left with for the summer season and how this might affect its markdown policy.