Marks & Spencer staff to share £80m bonus pot

Staff at Marks & Spencer will share an £80m bonus pot after the company beat its targets for 2009 despite the recession. The bumper payout is the second highest ever paid by M&S, and is larger than forecast. Head office staff and top management at the high street retailer will receive performance-related bonuses, while all store staff will receive a discretionary payment of "up to £500". An M&S spokeswoman declined to give more detail on how the £80m pool will be split between its 78,000 workers, or to say how large a bonus the executive chairman, Sir Stuart Rose, may receive. It is likely that head office and senior management will receive the bulk of the windfall. When M&S paid out its record bonus of £91m in 2007, store staff shared £26m while Rose received £2.6m . Last month, John Lewis announced its staff will share £151m in bonuses , or 15% of their salary. M&S announced the bonus pool alongside its fourth-quarter trading statement, which showed that the company beat City forecasts with a 5.1% jump in UK like-for-like sales in the 13 weeks to 27 March. It expects to post profits of £620m to £630m for the last financial year. Rose, who will stop running the company on 1 May when Marc Bolland becomes chief executive, said M&S's clothing division had performed particularly well, growing market share by more than one percentage point. "These are strong quarterly results by any measure. They demonstrate the appeal of the M&S brand to our 21 million weekly customers and its resilience in these difficult times," Rose said. "We hope that after the election there will be greater clarity on economic policy and how this will impact our customers individually," he added, predicting that the next year could be challenging for M&S's customers. Rose is one of the business leaders who spoke out against the government's rise in National Insurance . M&S said this morning that it had received fewer than 10 complaints from customers about Rose's support for shadow chancellor George Osborne's plan to partially reverse the rise. Unlike a year ago, today's quarterly figures included the first day of the post-Christmas sales. This helped M&S's general merchandise division, which includes clothing, to grow its sales by 10.6% during the quarter. Homeware sales rose by 13.3%, while takings at the food arm rose by 2.6%. But international sales fell 5.9%, as a result of "particularly difficult trading conditions in the Republic of Ireland and Greece". Shares in M&S slipped by 1.35% in early trading, to 373p. Keith Bowman, equity analyst at Hargreaves Lansdown, warned that Bolland faces a tough battle. "Timing [the inclusion of the Christmas sale] and the weather both look to have played their part, while the group's international expansion strategy looks far from assured. Furthermore, group costs have been rising, while doubt still persists in relation to the market positioning of the group's food business," he said.