The Co-op has fallen into the red after it suffered an £80m hit to profits as a result of a “malicious” cyber-attack earlier this year.
The group, which owns more than 2,000 grocery stores and more than 800 funeral parlours, was forced to shut down parts of its IT systems in April after it discovered an attempted hack.
Shoppers faced gaps on shelves in its grocery shops as a result of the attack, while its funeral parlours had to operate some services via paper-based systems without access to digital services.
On Thursday, the retailer said it estimated the disruption lost it £206m in revenue, and hit its operating profit by £80m in the first half of its financial year.
Overall, revenue fell by 2.1% to £5.5bn and the group fell from a pre-tax profit of £58m in the first half of last year to a loss of £50m in the six months to 5 July.
The group’s chief executive, Shirine Khoury-Haq, said: “The cyber-attack highlighted many of our strengths. But more importantly, it also highlighted areas we need to focus on – particularly in our food business.
“We’ve already started on this journey, refining our member and customer proposition, making structural changes to our business, and setting our Co-op up for long-term success.”
The company’s chair said the first half of the year had “brought significant challenges, most notably from a malicious cyber-attack”.
While the attack occurred in April, the Co-op revealed in July that all 6.5 million of the mutual’s members had their data stolen in the attack. Khoury-Haq told the BBC at the time that she was “incredibly sorry” for the attack, in which names and addresses and contact information was obtained by hackers. She said no financial information, such as credit or debit card details, or transaction data, was stolen.
The attack on Co-op came just days after another cyber-incident at Marks & Spencer, which cost the retailer hundreds of millions of pounds. M&S also admitted that some personal details relating to thousands of customers, such as names, addresses, dates of birth and order histories, were taken.
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The luxury department store Harrods was forced to shut down some systems after it was hit by a cyber-attack earlier this year.
The Co-op, which is headquartered in Manchester and employs 54,000 people, said it was still managing a “reducing level of cyber impact”. However, the group noted that it plans to open 30 new stores in the second half of its financial year, including food shops and franchise stores.
In July, the Co-op unveiled its first “on the go” store in Solihull, near Birmingham, as it moves to challenge takeaway outlets such as Greggs, Pret a Manger and Subway.