Marks & Spencer has confirmed the cyber attack led to £100m in costs, ravaging the group’s operating profit for the 26-week period ended 27th September.
Operating profit for the period fell to £184.1m from £413.1m in the same period last year despite sales rising 22% to £7.9bn.
The jump in revenue, however, was entirely due to the introduction of Ocado Retail revenue, accounting for around £1.5bn.
Stripping out Ocado Retail, M&S sales were flat. Ocado Retail, incidentally, is still loss-making.
Shares were little changed on Wednesday, with much of the bad news priced in. M&S had previously warned that the cyber attack could cost £300m.
“It had all been going so well at Marks & Spencer,” said Mark Crouch, market analyst for eToro.
“But as chief executive Stuart Machin put it, the first half of this year was “an extraordinary moment in time for M&S”, and that’s putting it mildly. The retailer’s underlying profit slumped 55%, laid low by the fallout from April’s cyberattack that crippled its website and halted online clothing orders for seven weeks. Click-and-collect services were down for nearly four, and food operations weren’t spared either.
“The damage shows most starkly in fashion and home, where profits collapsed by more than 80% to £46.1 million, and sales tumbled 16.4% to just under £1.7 billion.”
“It’s a bitter blow for a brand that had been flying high, finally shaking off its dowdy image and delivering the kind of retail renaissance investors had only dreamed of. That the share price has held up so resiliently is testament to the strength of the turnaround before the hack, but 2025 now looks like a year of what-ifs.”