Ocado may be the eternal jam tomorrow story. Another planned jump in capital expenditure this year will cause earnings at the grocery delivery specialist to be about £30 million below market expectations, dashing anybody’s hopes for annual growth.
The FTSE 100 constituent is ploughing cash into rapidly building online fulfilment capacity on behalf of third-party retailers and its own joint venture with Marks & Spencer. The result last year? A tripling of pre-tax losses to £177 million.
That much was expected by analysts, but almost doubling the number of customer fulfilment centres to 19 by the end of this year and increasing the capacity at some of its existing warehouses means that capital expenditure is set to rise by almost a fifth to £800 million.
