The retail technology year in review: February

RTIH takes a look back at February and rounds up the winners and losers.

Winners

Tesco and Amazon provide the best in-store and online experience respectively, according to research released by RetailEXPO during February.

Doug Putman, who runs the Canadian retailer Sunrise Records, bought HMV, beating out Sports Direct boss Mike Ashley.

Credit scoring startup Aire, which counts online retailer N Brown as a client, raised $11 million in Series B funding from Crane Venture Partners, Experian Ventures and Orange Digital Ventures.

Barclays lead an investment of £10 million into Bink, a British startup that links loyalty points to payments cards.

Softbank’s Vision Fund invested $940 million into autonomous delivery robot startup Nuro, at a valuation of around $2.7 billion.

Chinese people visiting the US could now use Alipay at Walgreens. The Ant Financial operated mobile payments service was made available at 3,000 locations in such cities as New York, San Francisco and Las Vegas, rising to 7,000 by April.

Walmart's all-important holiday sales didn’t disappoint, with its e-commerce business emerging as a star performer. Total Q4 revenue was $138.8 billion, with a 1.9% like-for-like increase of $2.5 billion, and profit stood at $3.69 billion. Whilst Walmart US eCommerce sales grew 43%.

British FinTech venture, DivideBuy, which provides an interest free credit option for retailers, closed a funding round of £60 million-plus, headed up by Souter Investments.

Online, wholesale, flower-delivery service, FlowerBx, closed a £4.2 million fundraising round, paving the way for its US launch.

Green Book landed three Oscars at the Academy Awards: best picture, best original screenplay and best actor in a supporting role. Take a bow Alibaba Pictures, an offshoot of Chinese e-commerce giant Alibaba Group which produced Green Book along with Participant Media and Dreamworks Pictures

Losers

The UK online retail space recorded its worst January sales growth (+7% YoY) in three years last month, according to the IMRG/Capgemini eRetail Sales Index. There was little relief on the back of a disappointing December, with retailers posting just over half the growth figure achieved during January last year (+13.9%).

Marks and Spencer’s website crashed on Saturday, 16th February with shoppers being confronted with the message: ‘Please bear with us. We’re working hard to be back online as soon as possible’.

GMB, the trade union that represents Asda workers, came out in opposition to the proposed Asda/Sainsbury’s merger as the Competition and Markets Authority (CMA) released its damning provisional findings.

Also in February…

Marks & Spencer and Ocado confirmed a much touted deal which will give the former a food delivery service for the first time.

Ocado reported a sales rise of 12% to £1.48 billion alongside a pre-tax loss of £44.4 million for the year ending 2nd December 2018, compared with £9.8 million in the previous 12 months.

The UK Click & Collect market is set to rise 45.8% over the next five years, hitting £9.8 billion by 2023, according to GlobalData. Growth, however, will slow as the space matures and services offered by retailers are optimised. And customer satisfaction is lagging behind home delivery.