Reuters
LONDON (Reuters) -Sainsbury's, Britain's second largest supermarket group, forecast strong profit growth in its new financial year as it reported a 1.6% rise for 2023/24, above company guidance, that partly reflected customer wins from rivals. The group, which has a 15.3% share of Britain's grocery market trailing only Tesco, is getting success from a strategy of matching discounter Aldi's prices on essential items and providing better prices for members of its Nectar loyalty scheme, financed by taking 1.3 billion pounds ($1.62 billion) of costs out of the business over the last three years. It said underlying pretax profit was 701 million pounds in the year to March 2 2024 - ahead of company guidance of between 670 million and 700 million pounds and the 690 million pounds made in 2022/23.