Dixons Carphone posts a 17% increase in profits before tax for the year to 30 April
Dixons Carphone has said that Black Friday trading and large-screen TV sales helped it to its fifth consecutive year of growing sales over the Christmas period Reuters

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."