Yahoo News Aldi to create 4,000 roles and open 100 new stores as profits soar
Watch: Aldi plans to create 4,000 new jobs next year
German supermarket group Aldi’s British arm said it would create a further 4,000 jobs in addition to the 3,000 roles it had already created this year and open 100 new stores as profits soar.
This will be part of a £1.3bn ($1.7bn) investment plan over the next two years. Its long-term target is to have 1,200 stores by 2025.
It reported a 49% increase in profit for 2019 and said it would expand across the UK over the remainder of the year and in 2021.
Grocery retailers have been among the winners of the pandemic, as spending moves closer to home.
News of the expansion comes as British politicians grapple with how to deal with a potentially deadly second wave of COVID-19 over the winter months.
British supermarkets have been on a hiring spree, and Aldi — Britain’s fifth largest supermarket — is no exception.
READ MORE: Coronavirus: UK supermarkets hire 136,000 staff during pandemic
In July, it said it had created 2,800 new permanent roles, and planned to hire the remaining 1,200 by the end of the year.
With similar expansion plans to rival Lidl, the German supermarket chain has previously said it planned to open around a store a week between July and Christmas.
A recent analysis by Yahoo Finance showed that collectively, British supermarkets had added over 100,000 jobs since the pandemic swept the country.
The hiring spree significantly exceeded the 44,000 roles they vowed to create as Britain went into lockdown in March.
Aldi’s pre-tax profits to £271.5m as it said it benefited from "efficiencies of scale." These had dipped the year before.
