Swedish clothing giant Hennes & Mauritz has said that their sales dropped below expectations in Q4 and correspondingly it would close more stores as customers preferences have moved towards shopping online. H&M CEO Karl-Johan Persson said in a statement that the company’s “online sales and sales of the group’s other brands continued to develop well” but that brick-and-mortar stores “were negatively affected by a continued challenging market situation with reduced footfall to stores due to the on-going shift in the industry.” Sales between September and November fell by four per cent as against the same period last year to 50.4 billion kronor (5.0 billion euros, $5.9 billion).

In local currency, sales dropped by two per cent. ”The numbers are really, really bad,” Joakim Bornold, an economist at the investment bank Nordnet, was reported to have said, “I can’t remember when H&M had a quarter in which the sales fell,” he added. In order to respond even quicker to customers’ fast-changing behaviour, the company’s on-going transformation journey is being accelerated,” Persson said. This includes continued integration of the physical and digital stores and intensifying the optimisation of the H&M brand’s store portfolio — leading to more store closure and fewer openings.