Marks & Spencer cyberattack leads to profit for other UK retailers

Next continues to see strong sales growth, a business success curve partly attributed to the cyberattack Marks & Spencer suffered earlier this year.

The UK retailer Next has released its trading statement for the third quarter of this year, and it’s nothing but good news for the company. It announced that full-price sales were bigger than previously expected and went up by 10.5% or $103.08 million (£76 million).

“Our UK sales performance in the first half benefitted from favourable weather conditions and competitor disruption,” noted the company in its quarterly statement.

In April, one of Next’s main competitors in the retail market, M&S, was attacked by Scattered Spider, a ransomware group that forced the business to shut down its online shop, app, and partially empty shelves in physical stores.

It wasn’t until August 12th that the business fully restored its online shop. The downtime created a window for retailers such as Next to attract more customers.

It came as no surprise when, already in July, Next raised its annual profit forecast as the company reported “better-than-expected second-quarter sales” that were triggered by, again, “warm weather” and M&S's cyberattack freeze on the business.

This quarter, sales in the UK slowed a little to 5.4%, but international sales jumped by 38.8%. As Next’s statement claims, due to the “positive effect of improved stock” and online marketing.

Next is not the only company that has reported gaining extra profit from the M&S cyberattack. Zara and H&M were among the retailers that said they’d made more sales during their rivals' outage from online sales.

During the same period, British supermarket chain Waitrose’s sales growth also outpaced M&S.

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