Poundland owner Pepco Group posts 19.4% increase in full year sales
Pepco Group, the owner of the PEPCO and Dealz brands in Europe and Poundland in the UK, increased its group revenue by 19.4% to €4.1 billion in the year to 30 September.
While group like-for-like sales rose by 6.5%, PEPCO’s like-for-likes grew by 9.8% while sales at Poundland and Dealz edged up 3.1%.
The group attributed the uplift to the strength of its proposition and higher levels of customer demand. In addition, Poundland benefited from extended categories in clothing and homewares and the introduction of a new frozen and chilled offer to 35 stores.
During the period, the group opened 424 new stores, or 483 when the recently acquired Fultons stores were included. This encompassed 364 for Pepco and 6o shops for Poundland and Dealz.
Andy Bond, chief executive of Pepco Group, said the group made good progress against its strategic plans during the year.
He added: “Despite the operational challenges from Covid disruption, we continued to open new stores across all three of our brands, opening 141 in the final quarter. This brought the total to 483 net new stores for the year – a record number of annual openings – including the first PEPCO stores in Austria, Serbia and Spain. We are encouraged by the initial performance of the Western European PEPCO stores across Italy, Austria and Spain. We are also pleased by the results of our store renewal programme in driving our like-for-like performance and enhancing the customer experience.”
The group now expects full year EBITDA to be within a range of €640 million to €655 million. This is at the upper end of analysts’ expectations and represents around 45% growth at the mid-point on the Covid-19 impacted prior year.
Looking ahead, Bond said: “In order to further drive our significant growth plans and recognising the financial strength of the group alongside the price sensitive nature of our core customer, we intend to invest into our price proposition to maintain our price advantage. We have developed clear plans to reduce our operating cost base through leveraging our increased scale and capability to maintain the continued delivery of our profit growth.”
