Ocado has reported its Full Year results for the 52 weeks ended 1 December 2019, which shows 10.3% Retail Revenue growth, making Ocado Retail the fastest growing grocer in the UK, despite capacity lost with Andover fire.
Group EBITDA was £43.3m reflecting the combined impacts of the Andover fire, the adoption of IFRS 16, and the costs of share schemes, broadly in line with consensus. The company saw losses before tax of £214.5m.
The comany's funding position strengthened to £751m, and a further £600m was raised through a convertible bond issuance after the year end.
The firm saw fees invoiced to International Solutions partners of £81.4m, up over 38%, bringing the total to around £140m of unrecognised fees by the end of the year.
Tim Steiner, Chief Executive Officer of Ocado Group, said, 'We are pleased to report results which show strong momentum in the business. Although statutory results reflected a combination of factors, including the impact of the Andover fire, the underlying performance of Ocado Retail and the successful growth of Ocado Solutions were very encouraging.
'Our progress over the last twelve months, which includes signing our eighth and ninth Solutions clients, Coles in Australia and Aeon in Japan, and successfully maintaining strong growth post-Andover, has demonstrated many of Ocado Group's most important characteristics: resilience, innovation, focus and execution. It is these qualities that will enable us to continue to develop the Ocado Smart Platform to meet the evolving needs of our partners at the cutting edge of online grocery retail.
'The first half of this year will see a new milestone for Ocado Group; the opening of the first customer fulfilment centres for our international partners. These state-of-the-art robotic facilities are a core part of an end-to-end solution embracing automated fulfilment, an intuitive and easy to use webshop, and hyper-efficient last-mile delivery which will enable Sobeys and Groupe Casino to deliver the same outstanding customer experience to consumers in Canada and France as Ocado Retail does today here in the UK.'