One of the UK’s leading retailers, John Lewis Partnership, has reported a 4.1% growth in y-o-y sales in the six weeks to 2 January 2016, buoyed significantly by online sales.
Accruing total sales of £1,811.1m during the festive period, John Lewis’s online offering proved most fruitful, growing by 21.4% compared to the same period in 2014/15 and accounting for 40% of overall sales. Among this mobile continued to be the partnership’s fastest-growing channel, with sales from smartphones and tablets up 31%.
Both sides of the business performed well with John Lewis gross sales reaching £951.3m, up 6.9% compared with last year and up 5.1% on a like-for-like basis. Meanwhile Waitrose achieved gross sales (excluding fuel) of £859.8m, up 1.2% compared with last year despite a drop of 1.4% on like-for-like sales in what the chairman of John Lewis Partnership, Sir Charlie Mayfield described as a challenging market.
He added: “John Lewis achieved another very strong sales performance with impressive growth across all three categories of Fashion, Home and Technology. Waitrose had record trading days leading up to Christmas and good growth online, while like-for-like sales declined overall during the six-week period.
"Click and Collect continued to show the strength of our two brands working together as a proposition for customers, with 35% of John Lewis online orders collected from Waitrose branches. I was particularly pleased to see overall customer numbers increase 5.8% against the same period last year.
"Our performance reflects to a large extent the significant investment we have made in our distribution and IT capability. Despite the fact trade was even more concentrated across a number of very busy shopping days, our operations performed especially well.”
Throughout the period three distinct peaks emerged - Black Friday, Christmas and Clearance – with higher sales and a different channel mix for each peak. During Black Friday weekend alone the partnerships distribution teams processed 18% more parcels than last year, which equated to five units per second during the peak hour. Sales in our shops for the total six week period were down 1.2%, reflecting lower footfall pre-Christmas, but were up 16.2% during the first week of Clearance (week ending 2 January).
