ASDA was on the brink of bankruptcy in the 1990s, its former boss has revealed.
Archie Norman, now the Chairman of M&S, became chief executive of the supermarket chain at the age of 37 – a time when the business was on the verge of bankruptcy.
Speaking about taking the job in 1993, Mr Norman, now 69, told GBNews: “During my summer holiday, I got a call from a head-hunter that asked me to come and look at this – I saw two or three of the non-executives and then they offered me a job. I was thrilled to bits, this was one of the UK’s top 100 companies, one of the UK’s largest supermarket employees with 80,000 people. It wasn’t till I got there that I realised the only reason I got the job was because I had been standing in a queue of one. They couldn’t get anybody else.
“I met with the team, and I said how long have we got on our debt facilities? And they said, well, we will be in breach of all our governance by October, this was in December. So, I said to my wife that evening, I know you’re going to come up and see the estate agents, but I said just hold on. If we hadn’t acted it could have gone under.”
“If you went into Leeds in 1991 and you went into a pub and you tapped on the bar, people would say ASDA price – so the underlying idea was alive and well. But it was our job to understand that and bring it back in a modern form.”
Mr Norman added: “I don’t think it’s about me. I think it’s about what ASDA is. M&S is a different brand but at ASDA we saw ourselves as the underdog. We were number four. We were coming back from the dead – Tesco, Sainsbury’s, then Safeway, all thought we were finished. In our own time, we went from number four to number two and with that overturned the convention of breaking the rules – that’s what we did and breaking the rules for the customer.”
Mr Norman explained how he didn’t always plan to go into the industry which he has now built his reputation in.

He added: “So both my parents were doctors and my grandfather and great grandfather – they were all doctors. We were sort of a professional family and I’m one of five brothers and none of us went into medicine.
“I didn’t really want to be in business, I wanted to be in management. What I do and what I enjoy doing is reshaping organisations to make them great places to work and a great place for their customers, giving them a sense of entity and well-being.”