Following today’s release of Currys’ figures for the half year ending 26th October 2024; Oliver Maddison, retail analyst at GlobalData, a leading data and analytics company, offers his view: “Currys is well set up for a strong performance going into the golden quarter as its H1 results continued to show improvements in its operations, seeing 1.3% group revenue growth and a 52% increase in EBIT on its continuing operations. In the UK & Ireland, this was achieved through maintaining robust sales growth of 5.7%, supported by recovering consumer confidence and an appealing service offering, while in the Nordics, cost control was the order of the day. Whilst Currys believes that most of the additional costs imposed by the UK budget can be mitigated and expects to perform well regardless, it emphasised that the impacts of this will be moderately inflationary.
“Currys’ immense profit growth of 53.3% in the UK & Ireland, significantly outpacing that of online pureplay rival AO, is emblematic of how successfully the retailer has taken full advantage of its omnichannel proposition to improve its margins through the sale of supplemental services, which once again proved to be a bountiful well for Currys to plumb the depths of. Currys saw credit adoption grow 1.4ppts to 21.7% and the installation rate for ‘big box deliveries’ rise 4.1ppts to 32%. Its star performer, iD Mobile, continued to outperform in the UK & Ireland, achieving 32% growth and accruing 2.0m subscribers. Indeed, mobile proved to be Currys’ strongest performance area across all geographies. This proves a stark contrast to online pureplay rival, AO, which saw its mobile business take a 12.7% dive in its H1 (ending 30 September). A similar trend emerges regarding business-to-business (B2B) sales – whilst Currys did not provide precise figures, it indicated its B2B arm is performing positively, once again knocking AO’s 11.2% decline out of the park.
“Despite its commanding performance in the UK & Ireland, its Nordic business, Elkjøp, continued to struggle, seeing its sales decline by 4.7% as it struggled to get consumers to return to spending. Nonetheless, by further reducing operating costs, it was able to achieve an EBIT of 50% as its margin increased to 0.8% from 0.4%.”
