British grocer Tesco reports record loss in 2014-15

Tesco, a British chain supermarket group, Wednesday reported a 6.4 billion pounds (9.6 billion U.S. dollars) statutory loss before tax for the year ending February 2015.

It is the worst results in the company's history. A year earlier, Tesco registered an annual pre-tax profit of 2.26 billion pounds.

Group sales in the financial year 2014-15 were 69.65 billion pounds, 3 percent lower than the previous year.

Tesco trading profit dropped substantially by 58.2 percent to 1.39 billion pounds over the same period, with a 78.8 percent slump of Britain's trading profit to 467 million pounds, data showed.

Consequently, the group's underlying diluted earnings per share shrank significantly to 9.42 pence.

Dave Lewis, chief executive of Tesco, said in a statement: "It has been a very difficult year for Tesco. The results we have published today reflect deterioration in the market and, more significantly, an erosion of our competitiveness over recent years."

Crawford Spence, professor of Warwick Business School, commented that the bad results relate mostly to Tesco's asset write-downs rather than its poor trading performance.

"Underlying trading performance for Tesco has actually not been too bad in recent months. In many ways, Tesco has decided to make these losses now rather than later." he said. (1 pound = 1.50 U.S. dollars) Endit