M&S' food sales growth slows after cyberattack, says NielsenIQ

LONDON (Reuters) -British retailer Marks & Spencer's food business saw sales growth slow to 9.1% over the 12 weeks to June 14 year-on-year, reflecting the disruption that followed a cyberattack in April, industry data showed on Wednesday.

Researcher NielsenIQ said M&S' food sales growth slowed from 10.8% in last month's report and 14.7% in the one before that.

Though M&S' market share ticked up 10 basis points on the year to 3.7%, it was down from the 3.8% reading in last month's report.

As part of its management of the cyberattack, M&S stopped taking online clothing orders and also took other systems offline. That reduced food availability and also resulted in higher waste and logistics costs.

Last month, M&S said the attack would cost it about 300 million pounds ($409 million) in lost operating profit.

The group resumed taking online orders for clothing lines on June 10 after a 46-day suspension following the attack.

Most of NielsenIQ's data broadly echoed the findings of rival researcher Kantar's report on Tuesday, with robust performances from market leader Tesco, number two player Sainsbury's and online supermarket Ocado.

However, M&S is not fully included in Kantar's market share data set.

($1 = 0.7341 pounds)

(Reporting by James Davey; editing by Barbara Lewis)