However, the group said Primark’s sales were up 7 per cent across the whole of its 16-week period to January 2, as it opened six new stores during that time.
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‘Our Christmas performance was strong, benefiting from lower prices on an outstanding range of products, ‘ said chief executive Dave Lewis.
Supermarket giant Tesco told investors it put in a “strong” performance over the festive period.
Over Christmas, Lewis said Tesco had reduced the price of seasonally popular items such as turkey, stuffing, vegetables, mince pies and Christmas puddings by an average 5%. In the week running up to Christmas, it put 4,000 extra staff on the shop floor to help customers during the rush.
The result marks a welcome improvement after a grim couple of years, with Tesco uncovering a £326 million accounting black hole in autumn 2014 that plunged the group into crisis, while in April last year it reported a staggering £6.4 billion loss. However, it was far from being the best perfomer of all supermarkets. This led to a 0.8 percentage point dip in its shares to to 28.3%.
This means that excluding the “coupon impact” Tesco’s third quarter United Kingdom sales would have fallen by around 0.5%.
Mr Lewis said in an announcement that their Christmas trade was solid, yet plenty more to do.
Even though it seems like everyone hates Tesco, and the horse they rode on, they seem to be slowly turning a corner.
– Global like-for-like sales growth of +4.1%.
“It was also good to see that clothing sales did well while Next and Marks & Spencer struggled”.
The result was much better than had been expected by analysts, who had been anticipating United Kingdom sales to drop by as much as 3pc as Britain’s biggest retailer continues its battle to revamp its business and lure more shoppers. The share price fell to 137p in early January as stockmarkets suffered their worst start to the year this century.
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Tesco, like the other supermarket stalwarts, has been struggling to adapt to the change wrought by discounters Aldi and Lidl, but revealed its first sales increase in over four years for the 19 weeks to January 9.
