The retail technology week in numbers

Do you like numbers? Do you like retail technology? Then this is the article for you.

$9.5 million…New Zealand automated checkout startup IMAGR has raised $9.5 million in a pre-Series A funding round led by Toshiba Tec Corporation.

56% of Brits shopped while drunk in 2019, according to research from finder.com involving 2,000 people.

9.4%…A solid December helped UK online retailers end a turbulent 2019 on a high, according to research by IMRG and Capgemini.

After a difficult start to the year, online sales rose by 9.4% year-on-year in December. This was not enough, however, to save the sector from the lowest annual performance seen on record.

£58 million…A Ted Baker blunder has seen inventory on its balance sheet overstated by £58 million.

$210 million…AppsFlyer has announced a $210 million Series D round led by General Atlantic.

$23 million…Soft Robotics has closed a Series B funding round, raising $23 million co-led by Calibrate Ventures and Material Impact and including existing backers Honeywell, Hyperplane, Scale, Tekfen Ventures and Yamaha.

1…Asda has launched a Click & Collect service that allows shoppers to pick up their online orders in under an hour.

£6.4 million…Coniq has closed a £6.4 million funding round, led by Guinness Asset Management and Maven Capital Partners.

71%…A large number of UK retailers are not prepared for the booming Chinese tourist market, according to research by JGOO.

The company ran a mystery shopper exercise in December, visiting 107 retail outlets on Oxford Street, Regent Street, Bond Street and New Bond Street. 71% failed to employ Mandarin speaking staff on their shopfloors (when looking at luxury retailers alone, 56% had this). Many also didn’t accept mobile payment methods like Alipay and WeChat Pay.

£107.01…Sainsbury’s has been named the cheapest UK supermarket of 2019, but shoppers are having none of it.

Which? crunched thousands of prices across Sainsbury’s, Asda, Morrisons, Tesco, Ocado and Waitrose. Its trolley of groceries contained 53 common items, from Andrex toilet tissue and Heinz baked beans to Weetabix cereal and Sure deodorant.

Sainsbury’s came out at £107.01, compared to £107.65 for Asda and £112.40 for Tesco, with Waitrose the most expensive at £117.81. The former was understandably thrilled at the news. Many shoppers, however, took to social media to berate Which? for not including two key players in its research, Aldi and Lidl.

£17.38 billion…Amazon is the global front runner in the research and development space.

RIFT Research and Development looked at the total spend by companies on R&D as well as what percentage of revenue this accounted for. Amazon clocked in at £17.38 billion in a single year.