Electricals and mobile phone retailer Carphone Warehouse (CPW) saw like-for-like (LFL) sales decline two per cent in Europe over its first quarter, it has been announced today.
In its interim management statement for the quarter ended June 30th 2012, total connections across its European operations dropped 17.8 per cent, which the retailer blamed on unattractively priced smartphone devices in the prepay market.
However, its successful Smart Deals promotion, which aims to offer the best value on the market, boosted postpay LFLs within the UK and CEO Roger Taylor said that CPW Europe remains well placed to service the complex postpay market.
“Our recent offers and new initiatives have already seen positive results across the business, and we are maintaining excellent customer service scores,” he added.
“As anticipated, the prepay market continues to be weak, but we remain confident in our opportunity to reinvigorate this market by driving smartphone penetration into this segment, particularly in the second half.
“Virgin Mobile France continues to perform well in a competitive market with strong revenue growth and growth in its postpay base as we continue to focus on quality customers.”
Virgin Mobile France saw year-on-year revenue growth of 13 per cent over the period to €122m (95.2 million) thanks to a burgeoning postpay market in the country and the company believes that these results point to progress despite continued challenges.
“At our results presentation in June, we said that in 2012-13 we expected the consumer environment in Europe to remain challenging along with the continued effect of regulation and competition in the mobile market and we reiterate the guidance set out at that time,” a statement from the group said.
“However, we see some exciting opportunities and remain confident in our strategic positioning and operational execution.
“We are making progress with the reorganisation of CPW Europe and will also continue to explore opportunities to gain further scale in a number of our mainland European markets.”
