Carphone trumpets telecoms success

The Carphone Warehouse had a booming Christmas as sales of mobiles and other telecoms services continued to generate double-digit growth.

Retail revenues rose 24.9 per cent to £355.8m for the 13 weeks to 25 December driven by greater demand for mobile phones and punters spending more cash using them.

The success of The Carphone Warehouse is in marked contrast to The Link, owned by the Dixons Group, which saw flat like-for-like sales over the festive period.

While the sale of mobile phone gear marches on, The Carphone Warehouse's own fixed line service - which takes great pleasure competing with BT - saw revenues soar 58 per cent to £99.7m. It's TalkTalk UK fixed line telco business added some 114,000 new punters in the quarter, taking the total number of subscribers to 762,000.

Said chief exec Charles Dunstone: "These figures represent a further period of strong growth. Our stores traded well and we achieved like-for-like growth despite an excellent Christmas last year. TalkTalk continues to attract customers at a healthy rate and the initial response to our broadband package [which it unveiled in November] has been promising."

Looking ahead, the company remains upbeat about the progress of its own telecoms services and of the performance of stores reselling packages from the major mobilephonecos. It expects the take-up of 3G services "to gain significant momentum" in the second half of the year.

The market welcomed today's figures from The Carphone Warehouse. By late morning shares in had risen 13.75p (8.7 per cent) to 171.75p. ®

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