LONDON (Reuters) -The boss of British supermarket Asda said he was seeing "green shoots" of recovery after the group slowed the rate of its sales decline in its first quarter, helped by lower prices and better product availability.

Asda, Britain's third largest food retailer after Tesco ( TSCDF ) and Sainsbury's ( JSNSF ), said like-for-like sales in the four months to April 30, adjusted to include Easter trading, declined by 3.1% - an improvement on the 4.2% fall in the previous quarter.

Asda said it had seen further improvements in May.

"Although we are seeing the green shoots in sales performance, there is a long way to go," executive chairman Allan Leighton said on Thursday.

Private equity firm TDR Capital, Asda's majority owner, brought Leighton back to the grocer in November, more than two decades after he served as CEO and turned the chain around before selling it to Walmart ( WMT ).

In March, Leighton warned his plan to be 5% to 10% cheaper than rivals would "materially reduce" profit. His comment hit the shares of Tesco ( TSCDF ) and Sainsbury's ( JSNSF ) on fears of a price war.

Asda said it had cut the prices of about 10,000 products, more than a third of its range, establishing a price gap of 3% to 6% over its full-service supermarket rivals.

It said product availability had increased from 90% to 95% since January, while customer satisfaction had also improved.

"People who've been in the industry a long time are amazed at the progress that we've made on availability in a relatively short period of time," Leighton told reporters.

Industry data published Wednesday showed Asda's sales fell 3.2% over the 12 weeks to May 18 year-on-year, with the group's market share down 90 basis points to 12.1%.

Market researcher Kantar said it was, however, Asda's best performance since May 2024.