Carpetright reports 6.6% sales increase

BRITISH-owned carpet and floor covering retail group, Carpetright, which operates 26 stores in Ireland, has reported a 6.6% year-on-year increase in British and Irish sales for the first quarter of its financial year, which runs to the beginning of August.

“We have continued to perform well in a tough trading environment and the sales achieved in the first quarter have provided an encouraging start to the financial year,” said the company’s chief executive, Lord Harris of Peckham.

The first three months of the fiscal year represented something of a performance turn around for the business, which suffered a 6.7% decline in sales in the second half of its last financial year (to the beginning of May) and a record 11.7% drop in sales in its core Britain and Ireland operation – prompting Lord Harris to state that its trading environment remained “very difficult.”

For that full year, group revenue fell by 7.4% to £483 million (€570.3m) and sales in the UK & Ireland business dropped by 12.9% (the company also has operations in Poland, Belgium and Holland).

At that time, the company said that the growing trend in mortgage approval improvements should result in a growth in sales levels “later in the year” and that outlook already seems to have come true to an extent.