Marks & Spencer Group plc is a major British multinational retailer headquartered in the City of Westminster, London. It is listed on the London Stock Exchange and is a constituent of the FTSE 100 Index. It specialises in the selling of clothing, home products and luxury food products. M&S was founded in 1884 by Michael Marks and Thomas Spencer in Leeds. The company also began to sell branded goods like Kellogg's Corn Flakes in November 2008. M&S currently has 979 stores across the U.K. including 615 that only sell food products.In 1998, the company became the first British retailer to make a pre-tax profit of over £1 billion, although subsequently it went into a sudden slump, which took the company, its shareholders, who included hundreds of thousands of small investors, and nearly all retail analysts and business journalists, by surprise. In November 2009, it was announced that Marc Bolland, formerly of Morrisons, would take over as chief executive from executive chairman Stuart Rose in early 2010; Rose remained in the role of non-executive chairman until he was replaced by Robert Swannell in January 2011. In recent years, its clothing sales have fallen whilst food sales have increased after the axing of the St. Michael naming for their own brand. On 22 May 2018, it was confirmed that over 100 stores will have closed by 2022 in a radical plan. Whether more stores will close is yet to be confirmed.
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