Lenta reports 3- and 9-month LFL sales growth

Russian retail chain Lenta is pleased with its third-quarter, reporting sales growth of 20.2% to 75.4bn rubles, up 4.3% on a like-for-like basis, against a strong comparative period.

Over the nine months to end-September, total sales were up 21.3% to 215.5bn rubles, and up 4.9% on a LFL basis.

Chief executive Jan Dunning cited the rapid fall in food inflation since the beginning of the year, and continuing pressure on customer purchasing power.

"In this challenging environment, customers continue to be price sensitive and bargain oriented," Dunning added.

"We have also noticed further stabilisation of purchasing trends with gradual improvement in the average number of articles per basket and average price per article as well as non-food sales growth," Dunning said.

"We successfully continued expansion of our hypermarket format with eight stores opened in the third quarter. Since the beginning of the year we have opened 16 hypermarkets of which 11 stores have been opened in big cities with population of more than one million inhabitants."

Lenta was well on track to deliver at least 40 new hypermarkets this year, and expected to beat its ambitious target of doubling selling space in the three years to December 2016.

"We have already secured all the sites required to meet our hypermarket opening goals for 2017 and have started working on the 2018 pipeline."

At about 14:32 BST, shares in Lenta were down 0.83% to 7.74 cents.