Asda confirms redundancy talks, 'hundreds' reported to be cut

Asda has confirmed it is beginning staff consultations on Monday ahead of what could be hundreds of job cuts.

Wal-Mart's UK supermarket business confirmed reports by Sky News that it was speaking to staff at its head office in Leeds.

The Grocer magazine said there would be many senior redundancies across marketing, merchandising and category planning.

The cuts come in the wake of confirmation from Wal-Mart on Friday that it was closing 269 stores in the US and Latin America, resulting in 16,000 job cuts, 10,000 of them in the US.

Asda, which saw its market share contract over the Christmas shopping period, issued a statement that said: "It’s well documented that in recent years, customers have radically changed the way they shop."

"We were the first of the “big four” to recognise this and launch a new strategy in 2013 yet the external pressures have accelerated at an increasingly rapid rate over the last 18 months.

“As a result, the industry faces major challenges and the certainty of permanent structural change. In the context of this, we also have to further change the way we do business.

“Today, we have started to talk to our colleagues in head office functions about what this means for them.

"We have made some difficult but necessary decisions but we must discuss these with our colleagues before we talk publicly.”

Last week, data from Kantar Worldpanel found Asda was one of the worst performers over the festive period with a 3.6% fall in sales year-on-year and a decline in market share to 16.2%.

This capped a tough year for Asda, having been overtaken by Sainsbury's as the second largest UK grocer, and in an interview with the Sunday Telegraph earlier this month, boss Andy Clarke warned that there were further challenges to face in 2016 as he prepared to pump another £500m into slashing prices, bringing the total investment in price cutting to £1.5bn by 2018.

“There is currently no growth in the food market and the rise of the discounters means that we must take radical action to win back our customers,” he said.