Super Retail Group’s trading update provides divergent implications with sales improving slightly, but gross margins deteriorating a little in Feb-April 2024. Rebel has accelerated a little, while BCF slowed. The commentary on gross margins is a little softer. The company outlined the implications of its recent wage agreement, which will entrench higher cost growth for FY25e.

Australian retail sales rose 3.3% in April 2023, which is the first month of fundamental weakness in a long time. The softness is skewed towards housing categories. Electronics, hardware and furniture sales are all falling. Fashion has reverted to low single-digit growth too. Online has recovered, but is only slightly ahead of overall sales growth. We expect weak sales trends for the remainder of 2023.

Coles Redbank ADC will have 33% lower operating costs compared with the two DCs it is replacing. The physical footprint is also 50% smaller. Coles is consolidating all 18,000 ambient SKUs into the one site and the ADC will build pallets specific to each aisle of a store. The Redbank DC will ramp up to a typical 2.7 million cases per week and can manage up to 4.0 million in peak periods.

Once the NSW equivalent DC, Kemps Creek, is operational in the March quarter of 2024, Coles will have halved its ambient DC footprint in NSW and QLD but have twice the DC capacity

It is inevitable that Australian retail sales growth will be much weaker in 2023 compared with 2022. We forecast industry sales growth at 2%, down from 11% last year. Many are anticipating that retail spending will fall off a cliff. However, volumes are already weak. It is price inflation that is supporting above trend spending. We expect inflation to taper off gradually, which means a more visible downturn in retail sales in the July-December 2023 period in our view. The categories most vulnerable to an earlier slowdown are furniture, hardware and recreational goods where we forecast a decline this year. In the food sector, elevated inflation will support growth of 5% in 2023. The risks to our retail forecasts are to the upside if inflation is higher and households dip into their excess savings built up over the past three years.