Ocado has published its financial results for the year ended 3 December, revealing a substantial drop in pre-tax profits, as the retailer ramped up investment in its technology arm.

The online-only grocer saw sales increase by 12.4 per cent to £1.3 billion, while solutions revenues grew by 16.2 per cent to £115.5 million. However, the retailer reported a loss of £500,000 compared with a £12 million profit in 2016.

This loss comes as the company announced significant investment in technology innovation and operational improvements. Ocado is developing a broad range of technologies, including real-time control systems and robotics, computer vision systems, machine learning and AI, data science, forecasting and routing systems, inference engines, the cloud, Internet of Things, big data and more.

Ocado became one of the first UK retailers to integrate with Amazon’s Echo devices, while order accuracy remains high at 98.8 per cent. Active customers have increased 11.2 per cent to 645,000, while order volumes have grown 14.3 per cent year-on-year to 263,000 per week.

Tim Steiner, chief executive of Ocado, said: “Now is the time to take advantage of our growth opportunities. We will invest to ramp up our new solution in both Erith and Andover and to have the right resources in place to meet growing demand for the Ocado Solutions offer.

“We believe that taking advantage of these international opportunities now will make our virtuous cycle turn faster in the years ahead and we expect that to translate into higher returns on capital.”

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