40 2GM Friday August 7 2020 | the times
Business
Shore in 2011 as a quoted shell com-
pany. The group bolstered its financial
position yesterday by extending bank
facilities to £25.8 million and raising
£2.25 million of new equity. The shares
were sold at 6.25p, a 2 per cent premium
to Wednesday’s close. The issue, in
which directors signed up for £600,000
of shares, was oversubscribed.
Shares in Fulham Shore rose by a
penny, or 15.9 per cent, to just over 7p.
Elsewhere, Richard Caring, 72, the
leisure billionaire, is tipped to close at
least 20 of his 78 Bill’s restaurants in
response to the Covid crisis.One of Britain’s longest-serving restau-
rant bosses said that the first three days
of the Eat Out to Help Out scheme had
been “the most astonishing I’ve ever
experienced” amid soaring sales.
David Page, chairman of Fulham
Shore, owner of the Franco Manca pizza
chain and The Real Greek, said the
group’s restaurants were “so busy even I
couldn’t get a table if I wanted one”.
The government initiative gives
diners 50 per cent off a meal in partici-
pating restaurants up to a maximum of
£10 per person from Monday to
Wednesday until the end of this month.
Mr Page, 68, a former boss of Pizza
Express, said the scheme had generated
so much extra business that he had
been able to bring the remaining fur-
loughed staff back into work, even
though six of its central London restau-
rants remained closed.
During the three days the restau-
rants had constant queues, with Franco
Manca sites recording 130 per cent of
normal sales and The Real Greek sites
148 per cent. That compares with 60 per
cent of normal sales in the first week of
reopening and 82 per cent last week.
“It’s been the most amazing bounce-
back, though we’ll have to see what
happens this weekend, whether cus-
tomers have shifted to earlier in the
week,” he said. Mr Page set up FulhamEat Out debut hailed ‘astonishing’
Dominic WalshFulham Shore’s Franco Manca
restaurants recorded sales that
were well above normal in the
first three days of the schemeOcado deal hands M&S chance
The penny bazaar that became
a multibillion-pound business
1880 1890 1920 1940David Marks
opens a Penny
Bazaar in Leeds1884
M&S starts
selling
clothing
including
women's
underwear1920
Self-service
food shopping
introduced1948
Share price 800p
6004002000
85 1990 95 2000 05 2010 15 2020has a history of food innovation: it was
the first to sell ready-meal chicken ki-
evs and invented the cold-chain refrig-
eration that allowed supermarkets to
sell fresh chicken, rather than frozen.
However, M&S has become the last
of the big grocers to move online.
Before signing the deal with Ocado, it
had tied itself in knots trying to figure
out how to enter the fastest-growing
part of the food market, but its small
basket sizes meant it was impossible to
make any money from deliveries.
As Ocado’s 20-year contract with
Waitrose was ending, this provided an
opportunity for M&S to launch inter-
net groceries. Since the £1.5 billion joint
venture was signed in February last
year, the online market has doubled in
size and the pandemic has spurred
shoppers to switch to food deliveries.
While soaring demand for delivery
slots means that M&S will be playing in
an even bigger online market and won’t
have to work as hard to attract
customers, it faces the challenge of
avoiding an exodus of Waitrose
shoppers who have become used to
buying groceries through Ocado.
M&S’s expansion of convenience
stores means it has been seen as a place
to buy sandwiches or treats for special
occasions but rarely the weekly shop.
Stuart Machin, the M&S food boss who
arrived in 2018 after stints at Asda,
Sainsbury’s and Tesco, has focused on
turning around M&S’s sagging food
sales by focusing on family customers.
“We needed to protect the magic and
modernise the rest,” Mr Machin, 49,
says. “We have such a great brand, we
wanted to protect the heritage but we
had to modernise the business.”
Ocado provides the opportunity for
M&S to attract new, younger family
shoppers who will make larger pur-
chases than commuters who buy their
lunch from Simply Food stores.
M&S has some heavy lifting to do in
convincing shoppers that it is possible
to do a weekly shop with it and not
break the bank. Mr Machin says that
most British shoppers only see a small
portion of M&S’s range, with just 40 outFood product lines are being revamped in an effort to
win over Middle England, Ashley Armstrong writes
Marks & Spencer’s long history of false
dawns and stuttering clothing sales
made Archie Norman, its chairman,
fear that people had started to think it
was “not a business of tomorrow”.
The retail veteran blames the bell-
wether group for “spending the past 23
years in drift” and “suffering from a
deficit in confidence”. As a result it has
the unenviable status of being the
company that people most
love to complain about.
Yet M&S is hoping to
give Middle England
something new to talk
about as it gears up to
sell groceries online
for the first time with
Ocado. The com-
pany is paying Ocado
£750 million for a 50
per cent share of its
retail business, a move
in line with Mr Norman’s
ambitions to modernise the
group. “It is a big leap for-
wards,” Mr Norman, 66, told The
Times. “All of a sudden our business
looks completely different. Ocado is a
game-changer as much for the people
inside the company as outside.”
The Ocado tie-up will do little to
solve the problems that dog M&S’s
clothing business or fix its bloated shop
estate. But if M&S can share just a sliver
of Ocado’s recent meteoric share price
growth, the venture will be
deemed a success.
“Ocado is important for
the business because it
gives M&S customers,
staff and shareholders
hope,” Clive Black, an
analyst at the broker
Shore Capital, said.
“M&S can’t keep just
downsizing — it has
to be relevant for the
future.”
M&S’s roots started in
food when Michael
Marks opened a penny ba-
zaar in Leeds in 1884 selling
flour, spices and sweets. M&S alsoof being the
e most
t.
to
de
an’s
ethe
eapfor-
6 6, toldThegrowth, the
deemed a
“Oca
the b
give
sta
ho
an
S
“M
do
to
fut
M
ffood
MMarks o
zaar in Le
ffflflour, spices an