Dixons Carphone: Christmas trading was a rollercoaster

Black Friday success prompts 'strange shape' for December sales

Dixons Carphone has said it was "pleased with the end result" of its festive trading period, despite a Black Friday boom prompting slower sales in the run-up to Christmas Day.

In a Christmas-trading update today, the firm said overall, pro forma like-for-like group revenue for the nine weeks to 3 January was up seven per cent.

The figures for the UK and northern Europe stood at eight per cent and six per cent respectively, but in southern Europe, sales fell four per cent. Profit before tax is expected to come in between £335m and £375m for the full year.

Last year, US sensation Black Friday – massive retail sales following the Thanksgiving holiday – arrived in the UK, with some customers reported to have got into scuffles in their bids to bag a bargain. Dixons Carphone said the frenzy was felt across its stores too.

Group chief executive Sebastian James said the new phenomenon led to a "strange" run-up to Christmas.

"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," he said.

"The strange shape of this year's Christmas trading was something of a rollercoaster but I am very pleased with the end result. In all our largest trading markets we have excellent like-for-like performance against fairly tough comparables."

On a conference call with analysts giving more details of the results, Dixons Carphone's finance director Humphrey Singer said Black Friday was not going away.

"It was bigger than anybody expected but that's just the way it is. I think it's here to stay," he said, according to the Guardian, which was on the call. "It's one of those phenomena we have imported from our American cousins that we need to plan for and get used to."

The tablet market has taken a bit of a battering in recent weeks, with analysts predicting its high-growth days are firmly behind it. Dixons Carphone said sales of the devices "fell sharply" over Christmas but said the impact was offset by a return to growth in laptops.