By James Davey
LONDON (Reuters) -Lidl GB, the UK arm of the German discount supermarket chain, will accelerate new store openings to win market share from larger rivals, it said on Wednesday, as it reported a near fourfold jump in annual profit.
Lidl GB is currently Britain’s sixth largest grocer but is poised to overtake Morrisons to become number five.
CEO Ryan McDonnell said the discounter sees an opportunity for “hundreds more stores”.
Having opened 12 new stores in its year to February 28, 2025, Lidl GB will open 40 more in 2025/26 and mark its 1,000th store opening next month.
“40 is a good run rate and that sort of would set a benchmark for upcoming years,” McDonnell told Reuters in an interview.
He declined to put a ceiling on Lidl GB’s store ambitions. Rival German-owned discounter Aldi has a target of 1,500 UK stores.
TWO DECADES OF RAPID EXPANSION
Lidl GB, which is owned by Germany’s Schwarz Group, and Aldi have expanded rapidly over the past two decades, transforming Britain’s supermarket scene and forcing market leader Tesco and number two player Sainsbury’s to compete more aggressively on prices.
Lidl GB made a pretax profit of 156.8 million pounds ($210.4 million) in the year to February 28, 2025, compared with 43.6 million pounds in 2023/24, driven by a 7.9% increase in revenue to 11.7 billion pounds. Some 38 million more customer visits were made to its stores than in the year prior.
In 2024/25 it invested nearly 500 million pounds in upgrading and expanding infrastructure.
Industry data published last week showed Lidl GB’s sales rose 10.8% year-on-year over the 12 weeks to October 5, giving it a UK grocery market share of 8.2%, just 0.1 percentage point behind Morrisons.
The data also showed Lidl remains Britain’s fastest-growing bricks-and-mortar supermarket, a title it has held for over two years.
McDonnell said he was hopeful the UK government’s budget on November 26 would deliver for business after tax hikes last year.
“We’ve been very adamant with government that they need to be careful around adding any further inflationary pressures on businesses,” he said.
($1 = 0.7451 pounds)
(Reporting by James Davey; Editing by Kate Holton and Tomasz Janowski)
