21st Jan 2015 07:22
LONDON (Alliance News) - Electronics retailer Dixons Carphone PLC Wednesday said trading over the key Christmas trading period was like a "roller-coaster", but said market share gains and good sales growth over the festive season have left it confident of delivering a full-year profit ahead of market expectations.
The group, formed from a merger of Dixons Retail and Carphone Warehouse in the summer last year, said UK and Ireland like-for-like sales were up 8% over the nine weeks to January 3 from the year before. In Northern Europe, like-for-like sales were up 6% on the year, but in Southern Europe they fell by 4%.
Overall group like-for-like sales were up 7%, which the electronics retailer said was driven by further market shares gains across electrical and mobiles in the UK and Ireland, Nordics and Greece.
"The strange shape of this year's Christmas trading was something of a roller-coaster, but I am very pleased with the end result. In all of our largest trading markets, we have excellent like-for-like performance against fairly tough comparables. At the same time, we have also experienced stable gross margin," said Chief Executive Sebastian James in a statement.
Echoing similar comments from other retailers, Dixons Carphone said that the US-inspired heavy promotional 'Black Friday' kicked off the Christmas season, delivering record sales. However sales dipped in the weeks that followed, before picking up again during the Boxing Day sales.
"There is no doubt that the huge scale and success of our Black Friday promotion impacted the three weeks that followed, but it was good to see customers respond positively to the deals that we had on Boxing Day where we saw growth from our record-breaking numbers last year in both the UK and Nordics," said James.
Dixons Carphone said that with the peak time of the year now behind it, it is "comfortable" with delivering a pro forma headline pretax profit ahead of market expectations in the range of GBP355 million to GBP375 million.
"This includes continued price and service investment as well as, of course, the impact of the decline in the value of the Norwegian krone which affects us negatively in sterling terms," said James.
James also highlighted a trend shift in the way customers choose to shop and when.
"There have been some market shifts as product lifecycles and ways of buying change: online has risen as a proportion, with excellent growth in both home delivery and click-and-collect," he said.
By Rowena Harris-Doughty; [email protected]; @rharrisdoughty
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