The grocer’s like-for-like sales jumped 5.2% year-on-year in the nine weeks to 1 January and despite ongoing store closures its total sales also improved, climbing 2% excluding fuel.
Morrisons attributes the performance to "improving the offer, becoming more competitive and serving customers better".
This has included keeping more tills open more often in-store and introducing an automated ordering system that uses cloud technology and store-specific historic sales data to better forecast stock requirements.
The system has improved availability of products "significantly" at the same time as reducing stock levels.
Morrisons, which was late to entering ecommerce, is also recording growth in online sales and reveals that during the Christmas trading period Morrisons.com achieved its biggest ever week for sales.
The supermarket says its ‘Best’ product range is "already proving very popular" with over half of customer baskets including at least one ‘Best’ item.
The strong Christmas trading performance is another sign of the turnaround being led at the grocer since the arrival of David Potts as chief executive.
Potts said: "This Christmas we made further improvements to the customer shopping trip.
"We stocked more of what our customers wanted to buy, more tills were open more often, and product availability improved as over half of sales went through our new ordering system. Both like-for-like and total sales grew, which was very encouraging."
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