Stefan Mileschin

24 percent profit slump

Troubled British electricals and mobile phone retailer, Dixons Carphone has confirmed that things are not well with the company.

The outfit reported a 24 percent slump in annual profit, as expected, and said it would take time to turn around the group’s performance in a tough market.

The company, which issued a huge profit warning last month, said it made an underlying pretax profit of £382 million pounds for the year to April 28, down from £500 million in 2016-17.

The group, which trades as Currys PC World and Carphone Warehouse in the UK & Ireland, Elkjøp, Elgiganten, Gigantti in the Nordic countries, and Kotsovolos in Greece, said revenue rose three percent to £10.5 billion and the full-year dividend was maintained at 11.24 pence.

In May, Dixons Carphone also warned of a fall back to an underlying pretax profit of around £300 million for the 2018-19 year.

New chief executive Alex Baldock was critical of previous management, saying the business was suffering from underinvestment in customer service which needed fixing.

“Recent events have underlined that we have plenty of work to do, and it will take time, but I’m even more confident than the day I took the job in our long-term prospects”, said Baldock, who joined the group in April.

He is focusing early action on recovering gross margins in UK electricals and on stabilizing the performance in mobile phones through improvements to its proposition and more favorable agreements with the network operators.

The group is budgeting for a further contraction in the UK electricals market in 2018-19 and a further decline in the postpay mobile phone market. It plans to close 92 Carphone Warehouse standalone stores this year.

To make matters worse, last week we reported how the outfit had been hacked.

https://fudzilla.com/news/46595-dixo...re-pretty-dire