The British online supermarket’s loss was almost five times more than the year before. Ocado warned it could lose more in 2020 as it gears up to spend over £600 million building robot distribution centres for Sobeys in Toronto and Casino in Paris, among others. (Financial Times)

Talking point: Founded in 2000, shares in Ocado, which investors tend to treat as a technology stock, have nearly quadrupled in little more than two years, shortly after it began transforming from niche retailer to what analysts have dubbed the “Microsoft of Retail,” hoping the company’s warehouse and logistics tech for other grocers will eventually be as ubiquitous as the Windows operating system. Ocado currently has orders to build 30 of its automated warehouses around the world. Sobeys announced an agreement in January 2018 to bring the systems to Canada. A year later, a fire burned down Ocado’s flagship automated warehouse in Southern England, where a fleet of 1,110 robots had sorted groceries from a three-storey grid of storage crates, completing an order of 50 items in five minutes. Ocado attributed part of its losses to that fire, but the prospect of robots bursting into flames—or not being able to smell smoke—hasn’t deterred investor confidence. Ocado’s enterprise value is currently just over four times forward sales, ahead of Amazon.