Marks & Spencer to close 100 stores by 2022

High street retailer Marks & Spencer confirmed its plans to close 100 stores over the next four years in a sweeping move that will cut a third of its core clothing and home branches.

With 21 of the condemned locations having already closed their doors, the company confirmed 14 newly affected locations of Clothing & Home stores for the axe on Tuesday as it further actions its strategy to move sales online and dispense with problematic shops from an estate that stood at 1,035 stores at the end of its past financial year.

Bayswater in London, Fleetwood and Newton Abbot will close by the end of July, while Clacton On Sea and Holloway Road in London will close by early 2019. Then Darlington, East Kilbride, Falkirk, Kettering, Newmarket, Speke, Northampton, Stockton and Walsall have all been proposed for closure.

Some 900 more jobs are at risk following the notice of the 14 further stores facing closure, added to the 600 jobs have already been affected by the closures.

M&S will also open 15 fewer Simply Food stores this year as the opening programme is scaled back.

Sacha Berendji, Marks & Spencer’s retail, operations and property director, said: “Closing stores isn’t easy but it is vital for the future of M&S. Where we have closed stores, we are seeing an encouraging number of customers moving to nearby stores and enjoying shopping with us in a better environment, which is why we’re continuing to transform our estate with pace.”

Forecasts put the retailer’s share of the UK clothing market at 7.6%, roughly half its share from 20 years ago, leading Maureen Hinton, group retail research director at GlobalData, to conclude that M&S does not need “so much space and so many stores” to deliver comparatively low non-food revenues of £3.8bn.

Hinton added: “Marks & Spencer has dominated the UK clothing market for decades, but its lead as number one is perilously close to being lost to Primark this year.”

The company’s annual financial results, due for release on Wednesday, are expected to show a 7% reduction in pre-tax profits driven by a 1.1% drop in in-store sales of clothing and home products.

As of 1217 BST, Marks & Spencer Group’s shares were down 2.73% at 292.20p.