British retailer John Lewis said its new chairman Sharon White has launched a strategic review of the business as the group today a 23% fall in annual profit.
It was the third annual decline in profit in a row and Sharon White, the former head of UK telecoms and media regulator Ofcom, warned that it could take up to five years to transform the employee-owned group and yield results.
The John Lewis Partnership runs the eponymous department store chain and upmarket supermarket Waitrose.
The review will focus on how the group can strengthen its core retail business and develop new services outside retail.
It will look at "right sizing" its store estate through a combination of new formats and new locations; repurposing and space reductions of existing stores; and closures, where necessary.
Three Waitrose stores will close later this year, it said.
The group reported a pretax profit before one off items and partnership bonus of £123m in the year to January 25, 2020, down from £160m the previous year.
It also said it would pay its 80,000 workers, which it calls partners, a bonus of just 2% of salary - the lowest since 1953 when it paid no bonus.
