The company value of Greggs dropped by £40million today after major technical problems forced the bakery chain to shut hundreds of stores in Britain.
Greggs stores across the UK were hit by IT problems preventing many from accepting card payments, forcing some to close and others to only accept cash.
The chain’s share price on the London Stock Exchange slipped by 1.3 per cent or 36 points from 2,830 at the previous close yesterday to 2,794 by 1pm this afternoon.
This gave a £40million drop in company value – from yesterday’s intraday market capitalisation figure of £2.87billion, to £2.83billion at 1pm today. The fall was the same as 33million Greggs sausage rolls, given the average UK price for one is £1.20.
However, the firm’s share price recovered later in the afternoon to be trading roughly flat at 2,820 points – a fall of 10 points or 0.35 per cent on the previous day.
The company, which is the UK’s biggest fast food chain with 2,450 branches, had annual sales of £1.8billion last year, equating to a daily average of £5million.
But MailOnline understands that given the problem only lasted for two hours and impacted less than a third of outlets, the cost to the company is likely to have been in the tens of thousands of pounds rather than in the hundreds of thousands.
It was the latest outage to impact a major chain in recent days after issues affected both Sainsbury’s and Tesco deliveries on Saturday and McDonald’s last Friday.
None of the prior three IT failures have been investigated as a potential cyber attack on those firms. MailOnline also understands the same is true of Greggs today – and there has also not yet been any confirmed link between the four companies’ issues.
While a total figure has not been given on the cost of all the outages, the Telegraph estimated that Sainsbury’s orders worth up to £9million could have been affected.
This was based on analysis of the supermarket’s 2022/23 sales figures which showed it sold a daily average of £8.7million in online delivery and click-and-collect orders.
Analysing the fall in company value for Greggs, a Stocklytics spokesman told MailOnline today: ‘While the high street chain may be a go-to destination for baked goods, it appears that disgruntled customers may not be the only ones disappointed by issues affecting stores today.
The full story can be found here