Asda attracts wealthier shoppers

Asda, Britain's second-biggest supermarket group, is attracting a growing number of wealthy shoppers and not seeing traditional customers defecting to hard-discounters, its finance chief said.

"One of our strongest growth areas over the last three months has been in AB shoppers," Judith McKenna said in a telephone interview, referring to the wealthiest socio-economic group.

"We're still not seeing any evidence of us losing to discounters," she added. Ms McKenna declined to say where Asda was winning market share, but pointed to data from researchers TNS which shows sales rivals Tesco and J Sainsbury lagging Asda, and upmarket stores Waitrose JLP.UL and Marks & Spencer falling even further behind.

She said Asda had no plans to launch a discount range of brands similar to that introduced by market leader Tesco in September in a bid to capture some of the surging sales growth of discounters like privately-owned Aldi and Lidl.

She said Christmas would be highly competitive for supermarkets and customers would be "very value oriented."

When asked whether Asda would step up its promotions and price cutting, she said: "We will certainly be front foot in providing value to the customer."