Pep&Co fashion offer helps drive Poundland sales higher

By

Sandra Halliday

Published
May 29, 2019

The Pep&Co fashion offer helped owner Pepkor in the second quarter as the label’s presence in the UK’s Poundland stores drove sales higher.

Pepkor Europe, which also owns the Pepco and Dealz chains in mainland Europe, said Poundland revenues rose 3.1% in Q2 (the three months to March 31), which was much better than the first-half rise. Sales for the first six months of the financial year rose only 1.6% to €920 million.

“Poundland continues to outperform the wider UK high street,” the retailer said, citing the differentiation that its Pep&Co clothing concessions bring to the chain. Its fashion offer is now in around 300 branches out of its 875-store total. And it continues to tweak that total as it exits underperforming shops, relocates some stores to bigger spaces and opens new ones.

Pepkor as a whole saw first-half sales of €1.7 billion, a hefty 14.2% increase that was helped by the firm’s central Europe expansion drive.

CEO Andy Bond said: “Pepkor Europe is rapidly developing into a strong, geographically well balanced pan-European variety discount retailer. The strength of the group’s trading performance in the first half year reflects our market-leading positions within a core discount segment accessed by an increasing number of customers.”

And he expects that as the company grows bigger, its size will help it disproportionately on the profits front. “With the benefit of scale leverage in Pepco and targeted efficiency improvements within Poundland, profit growth in the half-year will be stronger than the revenue growth reported today,” he added.