Source: Sharecast
Ocado surged after agreeing to enter a partnership with Asda to develop the latter’s online business across the UK with the Ocado Smart Platform.
No financial details were disclosed but Ocado said the focus of the partnership will be to quickly replace and upgrade Asda's existing ecommerce infrastructure, with Ocado's solutions to be rolled out across both stores and dark stores from 2027.
Ocado and Asda plan to deploy Ocado's end-to-end solutions across Asda ecommerce operations. These include Ocado's front-end (webshop), In-Store Fulfilment, and software to support last mile planning and route efficiency.
Ocado said the transaction is not expected to have a material financial impact in FY26.
Broker Peel Hunt, which reiterated its ‘buy’ rating on Ocado, said the deal with Asda "ticks a lot of boxes".
It said: "In our view, this will be taken extremely well by the market for multiple reasons: 1) it is a new deal after a long gap, showing that new clients still value Ocado’s tech after all the recent negative sentiment; 2) this deal is in the UK, which is a market that Ocado has not been able to expand in significantly before given its client Ocado.com; and 3) this deal includes Ocado’s solutions for click-and-collect, in-store fulfilment and aggregators like Uber Eats, Deliveroo and Just Eat, which are solutions that could be offered to others, including Kroger, over time too."
Retailers were under the cosh, with Dunelm, B&M, Currys and Wickes all lower on the back of downgrades by Deutsche Bank.
The bank downgraded B&M European Value Retail and Wickes to ‘sell’ from ‘hold’ and Currys and Dunelm to ‘hold’ from ‘buy’. The price targets for B&M and Wickes were cut to 155p from 175p and to 165p from 235p, respectively.
Deutsche trimmed its price target for Currys to 150p from 155p, while the Dunelm PT was slashed to 850p from 1,200p.
FTSE 250 - Risers
Ocado Group (OCDO) 223.40p 7.11%
C&C Group (CDI) (CCR) 99.90p 5.37%
Raspberry PI Holdings (RPI) 836.75p 5.22%
Applied Nutrition (APN) 245.25p 5.15%
Ceres Power Holdings (CWR) 856.50p 4.48%
THG (THG) 33.68p 4.27%
Computacenter (CCC) 4,428.00p 4.19%
Ibstock (IBST) 104.80p 3.35%
Oxford Instruments (OXIG) 3,226.00p 3.07%
Softcat (SCT) 1,702.00p 2.96%
FTSE 250 - Fallers
Serco Group (SRP) 265.00p -3.35%
Dunelm Group (DNLM) 774.00p -3.13%
Aston Martin Lagonda Global Holdings (AML) 47.06p -3.01%
B&M European Value Retail (BME) 171.60p -2.05%
Currys (CURY) 149.30p -1.71%
Wickes Group (WIX) 178.00p -1.65%
Breedon Group (BREE) 283.20p -1.60%
Pets at Home Group (PETS) 188.60p -1.57%
Johnson Matthey (JMAT) 2,142.00p -1.47%
Diversified Energy Company (DI) (DEC) 1,080.00p -1.46%