Shop Direct suffers loss, blames e-commerce investment

Friday, November 9, 2012 - 10:43 by Simon Crisp

Shop Direct, which is the company that supports such popular online brands as Very.co.uk, Littlewoods and isme, has reported a 46 million loss over the past 12 months after tax.

This group is owned by the Barclay Brothers and has been in their control for the last decade, but continued losses are being blamed on the fact that it is making major investments in safe shopping online.

While more cash is being spent on creating a viable internet presence for the various retail brands it controls, it has also had to pay off 400 staff, who were made redundant over the past year.

While 46 million may sound like a significant sum, it was actually 37 per cent less than the losses that Shop Direct suffered in 2010-2011, which shows that the group is becoming stronger over time.

Spokesperson, Alex Baldock, said that he anticipates a strong Christmas period for safe shopping online and is somewhat confident in his company's abilities to take advantage of this boom.

Mr Baldock also said that tablet computers are predicted to be one of the group's top selling product categories, which echoes the similarly impressive levels of popularity that tablets experienced last year.

Shop Direct managed to grow sales by 0.4 per cent over the year, with products like smartphones helping to bolster the performance of the group and net it 1.67 billion for the year to June 30th.

Eighty per cent of all revenue generated by Shop Direct comes from safe shopping online, which is an increase of nearly a third, when compared to levels seen back in 2009-10.

It is expected that e-commerce will continue to be a successful avenue for the group and with all the investments that have been made in this area, you would hope that this would be the case.