Dixons Carphone chief praises impact of Black Friday on Christmas results
Dixon's Carphone's group chief executive has cited the impact of Black Friday on it achieving like-for-like growth in group revenue of seven per cent over the Christmas period, while its pre-tax profit for the full year is now expected to be between £355m - £375m.
The retailer has revealed details of its performance over the previous trading quarter ending on 3 January, including its key Christmas period and the emergence of the Black Friday sales phenomena in the UK.
Sebastian James described the recent Christmas trading period as a "strange shape" and "a rollercoaster" and added that he was pleased with the end result.
"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. Our availability, pricing, service and marketing were all achieving very strong performance and customer metrics, and this translated into growth in market share in all our key territories over the period," he stated.
"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. Prepay phone sales have continued to fall, replaced by postpay contracts to a large extent. We have seen a return to growth in laptops but tablet sales fell sharply as we saw less innovation in the category. We have seen excellent growth in ultra-high-definition TVs as people, rightly, trade into the newer technologies. Finally, white goods had a very good peak trading period across the board with particularly rapid growth in online."
He concluded by stating confidently his prediction that pre-tax profits would be ahead of market expectations, including price and service investments and the impact of the decline in the value of the Norwegian Krone which will affect the company negatively against the strength of the British Pound Sterling.