Morrisons has delivered a “solid quarter of progress” with sales and volume improvements, as CEO Rami Baitiéh said it was “intensively focusing” on availability and loyalty.

The supermarket giant reported a 4.1% increase in like-for-like sales in the second quarter to April 28, as total sales excluding fuel edged up 3.7% to £3.8bn. This is a slight dip from last quarter’s sales growth of 4.6%, but a step up from the same period last year when like-for-likes edged up 1%.

Underlying EBITDA for Morrisons’ first half jumped 16% to £321m.

Following its £2.5bn sale of its petrol filling stations to MFG, Morrisons completed its debt reduction tender in June and has reduced group debt by 35% to £4bn from a peak of around £6.2bn.

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Baitiéh said that supermarkets, convenience, wholesale and online all delivered growth over the second quarter.

He said: “Over the last eight months we have listened carefully to over 340,000 customers, colleagues and suppliers and the insights from this exercise are helping to refine and shape the activity in all three pillars of our strategy: commercial excellence, operations optimisation and new value creation.

“It’s clear that availability and our loyalty scheme are the two areas our customers talk about the most and so we are focusing intensively on these areas.”

Baitiéh also mentioned the success of customer focused schemes, and added that its More Card has more than five million active customers, while transactions using the card have grown by around 35% in the last eight months, with a target of 70% of transactions to be through the More Card over the medium term.

He also flagged that its Aldi and Lidl Price Match, which it introduced in February, was off to a “great start” and is “giving customers increasing confidence in the competitiveness of our prices across the shop”.

Elsewhere, convenience has remained an “important and strongly growing” channel for the retailer, bolstered by the completion of the McColl’s conversion programme, which has led to over 1,600 Morrisons Daily convenience stores operating across the country.

Morrisons chief financial officer Jo Goff added: “This has been another solid quarter of progress with sales and volume improvements right across the business. Our debt has now reduced by over a third and we made further progress on our cost savings programme with £78m delivered in the quarter, taking the total since the start of this year to just over £450m, in line with our £700m three year target.”