French Connection said 23% of its revenue came from ecommerce in its latest financial year. Of that, 48% of sales were over smartphones and tablet computers.
The fashion retailer, a Top100 trader in the IRUK Top500 research, said today that online sales fell in the first half, along with overall revenues – which, at £164.2m in the year to January 31, were 8% down on the £178.5m reported at the same time last year. But the proportion of sales made online stayed flat.
Pre-tax losses came in at £3.5m, up from £1.6m last time. Poor performance of the spring collection, as well as the closure of 13 sales, were said to have contributed to the falling sales, before turnover picked up online and offline at the launch of the winter collection. Like-for-like sales, which strip out the effect of store openings and closures, were ‘poor’.
Chairman and chief executive Stephen Marks said: “Overall the performance for the year has been disappointing due to the very poor first half but the improvement we have seen during the second half and into the new financial year shows we are definitely moving in the right direction.
“The reaction to this year’s collections has been strong so far showing that we are on track. We are early in the year and have a considerable amount of work to do to take the group back to profitability, although I believe the actions we have taken to date will go a long way to taking us there.”
The company said more personalised customer engagement had been enabled through a new CRM system, implemented in the second half of the year. “We have already started to see the beenfits of this feedthrough and expect this to increase during the current year,” it said in today’s results statement.