Pepco Group hails strong first half performance
Pepco Group has seen its first half revenue climb by 18.9% year-on-year to €2.37 billion despite shoppers scaling back due to the cost of living crisis.
In the six months to 31 March, like-for-like sales growth was strong at 5.3% following a second quarter uplift of 12.1%.
Underlying EBITDA was also up, rising by 7.3% to €347 million, whilst underlying pre-tax profit increased by 28.5% to €144 million.
Trevor Masters, chief executive of Pepco Group, said: “We are proud of the group’s performance in the first half of this year and the strategic progress made across the business.
“Despite a challenging macro environment, we accelerated our strategy, including our store opening programme, which remains the key driver of value creation for the business.
“As pandemic restrictions progressively eased, it was also encouraging to see the strong return of customers and the continuation of this into Q3 resulted in the Group’s like-for-like sales rising above pre-Covid levels for the comparable period three years ago.”
The group said PEPCO continues to be its main growth driver with over 200 new store openings in the six month period. Revenue at the retailer was up 7.2% year-on-year on a like-for-like basis.
Meanwhile like-for-like revenue at Poundland rose by 3.3% in the period.
Giving an update on more current trading, the group said its strong performance led by PEPCO has continued into the third quarter following a positive Easter performance, effective promotional campaigns and customers returning to stores after the pandemic. This improvement has now taken the group’s same store performance above pre-Covid trading levels.
Masters added: “We have maintained our market leading position on prices and through our continued focus on reducing the cost of doing business, we have been able to shield customers from price rises on some of our products at a time of significant inflationary pressure on household budgets.”
