The long term seems to be getting longer for online grocer Ocado | Nils Pratley

International adventures will be the crucial contributor but the UK operation is not irrelevant to the wider story

Tim Steiner, chief executive and co-founder of Ocado, has learned over 20 mostly loss-making years how to put a positive spin on the numbers, but he has excelled himself. As the group reported a thumping full-year loss of £501m, caused in large part by a huge earnings reversal in its UK joint venture with Marks & Spencer, Steiner claimed the same operation had “shown its resilience”.

Really? OK, the UK business added customers and online market share, but they were about the only metrics going in the desired direction. Turnover fell 3.8% as customers trimmed the size of their online baskets and top-line earnings from the joint venture collapsed from £150m to minus £4m. Rather than a show of resilience, this looked more like a demonstration of how the online grocery model can be horribly inflexible from the point of view of the operator.

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