Why Dixons Carphone plans to focus on ‘retail basics’ to build on strong growth

Dixons Carphone is looking to wearables, its new mobile network iD and improvements in customer satisfaction to build on its strong set of results in its first full year as a combined business.

Results for the full year to 2 May show overall revenues were up 6% while profits increased by 21%.

Like-for-like sales in its UK business were up by 8%, growth that CEO Sebastian James said was stronger than the rest of the market and meant the firm had increased market share. However, speaking on a call this morning (16 July) he said Dixons Carphone is “not satisfied” with this growth and wants to “drive its market share going forward”.

To do this it will look to invest in customer satisfaction. While he said there has been a “material improvement” in this metric and that its position compared to the competition is very strong, it is still “nowhere near good enough”.

“We will not be satisfied until we can say we never have a customer saga or an unhappy customer. That is achievable but it is still far away,” he said.

“We want to drive ranging, pricing, customer service, we must not forget about the retail basics. You will hear us talking more about services, what we are doing for customers. We are properly excited about it.”

James said Dixons Carphone will continue to invest in price, claiming it can beat high street rivals such as Argos and is competitive with ecommerce players such as AO.com and Amazon. Yesterday, the retailer launched its own promotions event to compete with Amazon’s Prime Day.

Carphone Warehouse launched its own mobile network, iD, earlier this year and James said it has seen an “encouraging start”, bringing incremental business to the company by targeting customers that are not well served by the traditional operators. The retailer plans to introduce “more fun stuff” later this year, including data sharing and “more exotic elements”.

The wearables category James described as both “an opportunity and a challenge”. It will introduce technology similar to “honeybee”, its B2B service which provides services to third parties, for the connected home, security and the wellness and wearables category, as well as digitally enabled “We compare, you save” proposition for the sectors.

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