Dixons Carphone says strong Black Friday helps post fifth year of rising Christmas sales

Consumer electronics giant Dixons Carphone has reported that Black Friday trading and large-screen TV sales helped it to its fifth consecutive year of rising sales at Christmas.

It notched up a 4% surge in like-for-like sales in the 10 weeks to 7 January 2017 across its stores, which cover 11 countries in Europe including the UK, Greece, Spain and the Nordics. This beat City forecasts of around 2.5%.

In the UK and Ireland, same store sales jumped by 6%, although the business added that 4% of this was thanks to sales transferred from closed stores.

Dixons said after robust festive trading it anticipated a "meaningful" lift in annual profits in line with forecasts of between £475m ($591.8m, €550.9m) and £495m.

The retail giant reported that although there was patchy availability of higher-margin mobile phones and tablets, which impacted upon trading, it said that sales of large-screen TVs – a bellwether product for the group – performed solidly across all markets.

Chief executive Seb James said: "Black Friday was our biggest ever across the group, and in the UK we saw trading stretch further across the week as well."

James added: "This year, as a result of our scale in all of our markets, we were able to offer prices that were truly ground-breaking during both our Black Friday week and our annual Boxing Day-week sales, while maintaining margins, and we believe that we have outperformed the market during the period."

Hargreaves Lansdown analyst George Salmon said: "While Dixons Carphone enjoys a key advantage in being the last remaining retailer of any scale that customers can visit to buy those must-have electronics, sterling's weakness makes it increasingly difficult to sell its imported items at knock-down prices and stay competitive with the likes of Amazon."