John Lewis Christmas sales boosted by online shopping

Sales at the John Lewis Partnership rose 4.1% to £1.81bn during the festive trading period, helped by another of its heartwarming Christmas advertising campaigns.

The John Lewis department-store brand was the driving force, with overall sales rising 6.9 per cent to £951.3m and like-for-like sales at stores open more than one year up 5.1 per cent.

John Lewis said patterns of trade “shifted significantly” with peaks on Black Friday, towards Christmas and in the clearance event – with higher sales and a different mix of online and store sales for each peak.

Gross sales at the company were up 1.2% to £859.8m, with online sales up 7.9%. The results were boosted by 21.4% growth in online sales, which accounted for 40% of total sales. Sales through Waitrose’s direct services websites, which include wines, hampers, flowers and kitchen gadgets, grew 28.1%.

Connor Campbell, senior market analyst at www.spreadex.com, said: “Despite parent company John Lewis having a surprisingly strong Christmas, Waitrose couldn’t manage a holiday bump”.

He added: “Our performance reflects to a large extent the significant investment we have made in our distribution and IT capability”. Waitrose turnover peaked in the last two days before Christmas, with a 6 % and 5.5 % turnover increase on 23 and 24 December.

But like-for-like sales at the John Lewis group’s Waitrose top-end supermarkets were down 1.4% to £860 million, hit by lower food prices.

Peak trade came particularly late this year and was more concentrated than usual in the days before Christmas.

Sir Charlie said the “click and collect” model was encouraging more customers to pick up online orders in store, with 35pc of John Lewis orders now picked up at a branch of Waitrose. Mobile continued to be the fastest-growing channel with sales from smartphones and tablets up 31%. Half of all online orders were click-and-collect orders.

The group said it continues to expect to deliver a pre-tax profit before one-off items and partners’ bonus of between £270 million and £320m for the year to the end of January, although this would be down from £342.7m last time. This guidance reflected both good operational progress but also an increase of approximately £60 million in pension charges as a result of market driven volatility. “Our guidance, therefore, remains unchanged”.