Morrisons now has a chance to focus on what once made it stand out

Outlook

No one would have been terribly surprised to see another rotten trading statement from Morrisons. If the sector had a misery index it’d be right at the top, above even Tesco.

And yet there were positives to be drawn from the latest, and no, I haven’t been drinking too much cheap alcohol, the sale of which by supermarkets gets everyone from publicans to politicians hot under the collar.

For a start, Morrisons is still making money at the operating level (on what it actually sells before write downs on property values and the like) and is happy with the City’s forecasts.

The company even expects things to improve on that front towards the second half of the year, although that might yet prove to be rather optimistic.

It still remains to be seen whether the decision to hire a battery of ex-Tesco people will be good for what ails the business, but chief executive David Potts (who is one of them) does at least seem to have started off on the right foot.

His moves to cut costs at head office in favour of hiring people to work in the stores and interact with Morrisons diminishing band of customers is such an obvious move that you do rather wonder why it hadn’t been done before. Perhaps it’s simply a case of Mr Potts casting a fresh pair of eyes over the retailer’s formerly beloved bureaucracy.

The new men at the top even seem to recognise that Morrisons needs to work out what it’s there for. Chairman Andrew Higginson – another Tesco exile – has talked up what a great competitor Morrisons was while he was at his old shop, how he and his colleagues looked with envy at its fresh food, its pies and the like, and the fact that 25 per cent of Morrisons products are made by, well, Morrisons.

What he seemed to be arguing was that Morrisons used to have a character its colourless rivals lacked. So expect a renewed push on fresh food (although that has been tried before) and an attempt to make Morrisons look like a family business as opposed to what it is: a large-ish retailer that’s feeling the strain and can’t seem to stop the bleeding as its customers desert it.

One of the virtues of private equity is that it allows businesses to be re-tooled away from the distracting glare of publicity that can be the bane of a business like Morrisons.

With a depressed share price, you’d think they’d be lining up to take a pop at it. But while there has been speculation here and there, the bidders aren’t exactly queuing up at Morrisons tills. Which says rather a lot.