Tag: shop direct

The Barclay brothers owned online shopping group has reported a before tax profits quadrupling.

A recent report that was released by Shop Direct, an online and mobile commerce group owned by the Barclay brothers, and has reported that its before tax profits have now increased by four times, to reach £40.4 million.

The company owns a number of different online shops and saw profits for the first time in 2013.

Among the brands owned by Shop Direct are Very.co.uk, and Littlewoods. Despite that it had been in existence for a decade, the first time that it had ever turned a profit was last year. It has also now reported having seen a sales growth of 3 percent – the equivalent to £1.7 billion, during the year that led up to June 30, 2014.

According to the company, mobile commerce played a very important role in its increasing profitability.

When looking at the figures presented by the company, it is not difficult to understand why it is crediting users of smartphones and tablets to its earnings successes. Its m-commerce took a very large portion of its sales, as a tremendous 44 percent of its transactions took place on some kind of mobile device.

According to the chief executive of the company, Alex Baldock, these are very powerful results and were greatly driven by the increase in sales that took place from mobile devices, especially when it came to the Very.co.uk brand. He explained that “These are strong results, driven by the outstanding growth of Very.co.uk and the unrelenting boom in m-commerce. Mobile continues to be a game changer for us.”

This growth of shopping over mobile commerce at its newer brands such as Isme and Very.co.uk, has managed to offset the declining sales that it has been experiencing at some of its older “heritage businesses”. Its earnings before interest, taxes, depreciation, and amortization (EBITDA) came to £164.8 million after having risen by 24 percent. The group’s largest business is now Very.co.uk, and it boasts sales of over £700 million. This has made Shop Direct another solid example of the way that retailers can evolve in order to embrace shopping over mobile devices.

The holiday and Christmas shopping season left the company’s previous accomplishments in the dust.

Shop Direct has recently revealed that is was one of the many online retailers that experienced a massive mobile commerce success over the last holiday shopping season, as its Very.co.uk and Littlewoods.com websites saw considerable surges in searches and purchases from smartphones and tablets.

This is being seen as further evidence that British shoppers are accepting mcommerce on a growing basis.

The trading update from Shop Direct said that its mobile commerce sales saw an increase by 64 percent over the six weeks that led up to December 27. Chief executive of the company, Alex Baldock, said that sales over smartphones and tablets had “exploded” in the weeks and days that led up to Christmas.

Overall, mobile commerce makes up 43 percent of the total online sales at Shop Direct’s sites.

Baldock also added that “By 2015, we expect every transaction to involve a mobile device at some point in the customer journey.” He stated that it is difficult to exaggerate the importance of this online shopping trend, and “we mean to stay on top of it.”

Shop Direct is a company that is owned by Sir David and Sir Frederick Barclay. They are also the owners of the massive Telegraph Media Group. They have revealed that they will be making a tremendous investment of £100 million toward the mobile development and digital business. A prime focus within this effort will be on personalizing their site, email marketing and digital applications.

During that same six week period, the company reported that their overall sales increased by 5 percent. This is an acceleration in its growth when compared to what it had been experiencing over the entire second half of the year, which was at 1percent.

There were a number of contributing factors to this growth, including the performance over mobile commerce, as well as the newer brands of the company, isme.com and Very.co.uk, which experienced a considerable sales increase of 27 percent. One interesting point was that in the weeks before Christmas, the company was selling one onesie every 35 seconds.