Australian supermarket Coles has reported a 30 percent growth in online supermarket sales, and 9 percent increase in digital liquor sales.
The grocery giant reported a net profit after tax (NPAT) of $1.1 billion (US$646 million) in the 2024 financial year, 2.1 percent higher than 2023.
Total supermarket revenue rose 4.3 percent to $39 billion, while liquor revenue climbed 0.5 percent to $3.7 billion.
Coles noted that liquor sales were impacted by lower customer discretionary spending, and the transition away from bulk and affiliated sales.
Dburing the 2025 financial year, Coles expects to open eight new stores, close five, and renew 50.
Coles Digital Growth
On the digital front, Coles reported a 42.6 percent surge in monthly app users, and 30.1 percent e-commerce sales growth at supermarkets. Online sales growth in the liquor business also rose 9.2 percent compared to the prior year.This includes partnering with a leading artificial intelligence (AI) provider to drive operational improvement, including help with rostering.
Coles has also delivered a new cloud data platform and developed an intelligence edge backbone for “rapid deployment of computer vision solutions across our stores.”
Further, Coles started rolling out easy liquor ordering, which the supermarket described as an automated ordering system.
Coles invested in two state-of-the-art milk processing facilities to improve milk supply and acquired 20 liquor stores in Tasmania—noting 30 percent of the state’s population now have a Liquorland within a five-minute drive.
CEO Thanks Staff
Coles CEO Leah Weckert noted the financial pressures on families, and thanked the 115,000 staff for their resilience and dedication.“The financial pressures on households and families have been front of mind for us this year, and we have endeavoured to deliver value across our supermarket, liquor, and online offerings to help customers balance their household budgets,” she said.
“At the same time, we have worked hard to deliver improvements in availability and quality, made significant inroads in addressing loss, accelerated our digital offering, continued to maintain a strong focus on costs ...”
Commenting on the outlook ahead, Weckert said, “With ongoing cost-of-living pressures, we will also continue responding to the needs of our customers with a focus on value through everyday low prices, promotions, Flybuys, and Coles Own Brand.”
Group Chairman James Graham said 2024 marked 110 years since the first Coles store opened in Smith Street, Collingwood.
“Ever since that time, we have been focused on providing great value, quality groceries and essentials to our customers,” he said.
Customers Shifting Away from Eating Out: Coles
Coles also said they were seeing signs customers were shifting away from out-of-home dining.The company’s “Finest” range and convenience meals were high-growth categories.
In the liquor business, Coles observed a 1.4 percent fall in sales revenue in the first eight weeks.
The July CrowdStrike outage also had a negative impact, as multiple liquor stores could not trade. Excluding the CrowdStrike impact, Coles said liquor sales revenue fell by 0.3 percent.
Looking ahead, Coles said 2025 would be a pivotal year.
“This is an important year for the business as we ramp up our second automated distribution centre and transition our metropolitan Sydney and Melbourne next-day home delivery orders to our two automated customer fulfilment centres, and we are optimistic for the customer benefits that we expect these to deliver,” Coles said.
Construction of these automated CFCs in Victoria and New South Wales is now complete, and they started operating in July 2024. Coles is also ramping up a Queensland automated distribution centre.
