“We have not, in the past, been sufficiently disciplined,” the company warned.The scale of M&S’s problems was highlighted by the company’s latest financial results which revealed a slump in half year profits from £193m to £183m for the six months to September. This included a fresh slump in clothing sales with menswear losing market share and the key lingerie section losing sales due to problems with suppliers. Profits in the core UK retailing business sank from £145m to £126m. However the results were not as bad as had been expected leading to a 10p rise in M&S shares to 195p.If new store openings are excluded, clothing and footwear sales fell by 17.4 per cent in the five weeks to 4 November.

M&S said it had been badly affected by the takeover of Courtaulds Textiles, one of its biggest clothing suppliers, by American company Sara Lee. This led to stock shortages in lingerie, knitwear and other areas.”These results are not acceptable to me or anyone else in this business,” said Luc Vandevelde, who joined M&S as chairman in February. “We have not yet got our core business right.”Mr Vandevelde declined to blame the bad weather or the fuel crisis but said the company had been surprised by the difficulty of the market in recent weeks. He said a further factor had been the soaring sales at C&A since the Dutch company said it would close all UK stores in January. He said C&A sales had risen by a staggering 50 per cent since the closure announcement increasing its share of UK clothing sales from 2 per cent to 3 per cent. M&S’s food business has performed better with underlying sales up by 4.6 per cent in current trading.The company admitted it was still vulnerable to a takeover though City analysts questioned whether anyone will bother “I don’t think they will be bid for. It looks like a long, slow decline,” said Nick Bubb, retail analyst at SG Securities..

Sir Richard Heygate, 60, worked at McKinsey for nearly 20 years before founding Sophron Partners in 1995, a London-based company which consults on customer management technology It now turns over £10m a year. Sir Richard Heygate, 60, worked at McKinsey for nearly 20 years before founding Sophron Partners in 1995, a London-based company which consults on customer management technology. It now turns over £10m a year.
My biggest mistake came down to classic hubris, and the fact that I spread my wings too far. It happened about two months ago.For the last few years at Sophron we have developed an extremely nice business, offering the kind of expertise which stands at the heart of the best new business-to-consumer internet operations.Because of our success, people began to ask us to build new businesses for them. We helped Ford build an online business and thought we were really clever. We then met some entrepreneurs who had a great idea for an online information business, an idea that we thought would outpace Scoot and Jeeves.We thought it would be a winner and we got involved far too deeply.