Morrison's to expand with local stores and online sales

Dalton Philips, the Irishman who arrived six months ago to replace Marc Bolland, wants to continue the drive into London and the South East. He claims the company is different from rivals.

"Morrisons does something very different to the rest of the pack because it does so much production in store. It has real bakers, real butchers and real fish mongers. Everyone else has given up on that," he said.

Philips says Morrisons is "under represented" in London, something he intends to rectify. One of the biggest existing stores, on the Holloway Road in N7, does booming business.

So far, Morrisons hasn't expanded into non-food or financial services. Philips says he's thinking about this and will update the market in March.

Today the supermarket unveiled sales in the half year up 9% to £8.1 billion. Like-for-like sales edged up 0.9%, better than rivals can lately manage.

Pre-tax profit was £412m, down 8%.

The internet push puts Morrisons in line to compete with the loss-making Ocado. Philips was adamant that the Morrisons scheme will be profit making straight away or it will be scrapped.

Seymour Pierce said in a note to clients: "The issue for the shares is that after the successful delivery of the four year optimisation programme post the Safeway integration, Morrison is felt to have more limited long term growth opportunities, relative to its peers, and has not yet pursued the same growth drivers others have, such as non-food, on-line, multiple formats, financials and international."

The shares fell 4.6p to 287.9p.