LONDON (Reuters) – The British arm of German discount supermarket Lidl on Wednesday set a new target to reach 1,100 stores by the end of 2025, creating up to 4,000 new jobs in the process.
Lidl GB, part of Germany’s Schwarz retail group, had a previous target of 1,000 stores by the end of 2023.
“We continue to see tremendous opportunity in the market,” said CEO Christian Härtnagel.
Britain’s food retailing sector has been transformed in the past decade by the rise of Lidl and fellow German-owned discounter Aldi, which have driven down returns at the big four players – market leader Tesco, Sainsbury’s, Morrisons and Asda.
Lidl, which has a 6.2% share of the UK grocery market but does not trade online, said revenue in the year to Feb. 28 2021 rose 12% to 7.7 billion pounds ($10.3 billion), resulting in a pretax profit of 9.8 million pounds versus a loss of 25.2 million pounds in 2019-20.
It said it invested 498 million pounds during the year.
($1 = 0.7470 pounds)
(Reporting by James Davey; editing by Guy Faulconbridge and Alistair Smout)
