The retail technology year in review: May

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

Winners

Delivery tech venture, Sorted, secured £15 million in a funding round led by Praetura Ventures and NVM Private Equity.

Payments venture Checkout.com raised $230 million from investors including Insight Partners and DST Global, in what is Europe’s largest ever FinTech Series A round.

Salesforce inked a definitive agreement to acquire conversational AI startup Bonobo. Terms of the deal were not disclosed, but media reports put it at $50 million.

Marks & Spencer and Founders Factory announced a third startup to enter their retail accelerator programme under joint venture, Founders Factory Retail. Texel lined up alongside ChargedUp, a mobile phone battery sharing solution and Rocketo, a healthy subscription dog food service.

Walmart had become a major competitive force in e-commerce and was now capable of capturing shopper share from Amazon and others, argued Neil Saunders, Managing Director at GlobalData Retail.

Saunders was speaking as Walmart reported better-than-expected earnings during the first quarter,  with e-commerce sales in the US up 37%, driven by strong growth in online grocery and its home and fashion categories on Walmart.com.

BrandHouse, a London-based online platform for fast moving consumer goods, landed €4 million in Series A funding.

Walmart topped Starbucks and Amazon in a new mobile app adoption study.

Research from Cornerstone Advisors and StrategyCorps revealed that more than 58 million Americans had the Walmart mobile app on their smartphone. Amazon was in second place with 54 million. Uber landed in third (52 million) and Starbucks took fourth spot (44 million).

B&M was on track to open 50 new stores in 2019. The discount goods retailer said profit before tax in the year to 30th March came in at £249.4 million - a rise of almost 9% on the previous year.

US startup Modsy raised $37 million in a Series C funding round led by TCV, with participation from Norwest Venture Partners, Advance Venture Partners, and Comcast Ventures. 

Losers

Some Asos workers were being threatened with baliffs over unpaid bills, the result of a payroll issue with XPO logistics, according to the GMB union.

Ocado launched a redundancy process after the online grocer said it would take two years to rebuild a Hampshire distribution centre destroyed in a fire. This was set to affect just under half the 850-strong workforce.

The UK online retail sector experienced a disappointing first quarter, and Easter failed to deliver a turnaround in fortunes, with April recording sales growth of just 5.2% YoY, according to research from IMRG and Capgemini.

Marks and Spencer reported the heavy costs of its restructuring programme just at it prepared to stick its hand out to investors for more money to fund its Ocado deal.

WHSmith was voted as the worst High Street store in a Which? survey of more than 7,700 shoppers.

Also in May…

Sainsbury's reported a 41.6% fall in pre-tax profits, weighing in at £239 million, for the 52 weeks to 9th March 2019. Revenue rose slightly to £29 billion, from £28.5 billion last year.

The GMB union called for an urgent meeting with Walmart over a possible Asda £12 billion stock market float.

Amazon teamed up with Next for the UK launch of Counter, which enables the e-commerce giant’s customers to pick up orders via a network of partner retailers.

UK shoppers should pay a transaction charge of 1p when they use self-service checkout machines, as part of a drive to heal generational divisions.

That was a proposal put forward by the parliamentary panel on social integration, chaired by Chuka Umunna. The aim was "to counteract potential damage caused by a lack of everyday contact between people" and to raise money for intergenerational projects.

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