Carphone Warehouse will increasingly target “key opportunities” in smartphone and tablet sales and said that like-for-likes fell 4.7% in the third quarter.
Across the 13 weeks to December 2011, like-for-likes were driven down by weaker demand for pay-as-you-go devices.
Sales of “non-cellular” products such as smartphones and tablets increased by 15%, but that is still less than 10% of the total revenue.
The retailer reitrerated that it will “move more deeply into tablets, accessories, applications and content, making Carphone Warehouse Europe the home of technology and giving customers many more reasons to come into our stores”.
Carphone’s ‘Wireless World’ format stores, which combine a connected electronics range “with a service proposition” will drive the push.
By the end of the quarter the retailer had 294 Wireless World stores across Europe and there are expected to be 375 by the end of March.
Carphone Warehouse chief executive Roger Taylor said: “We remain well-placed to benefit from continued consumer enthusiasm for connected technology, and as such we are accelerating the roll-out of our Wireless stores to meet this demand and deliver a strong service proposition that complements this segment of the consumer electronics market.”
The retailer has now shut 11 big box Best Buy UK stores, which were run in partnership with the eponymous US giant and said it was “confident in assigning the leases”.
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