LONDON (ShareCast) - O'Key Group, a Russian food retailer, posted a 9.2 per cent rise in third quarter like-for-like revenue growth, with traffic for the period up 0.7 per cent.

During the three month period net retail revenue increased by 19.9% year-on-year, while at the quarter end selling space totalled 452,000 sq m.

Patrick Longuet, Chief Executive Officer of O'Key Group, said: "We had a very successful quarter both in terms of operating results and in securing our future expansion plans. On [the] operational side, we maintained impressive growth in like-for-like (LFL) revenue, where basket growth exceeded inflation and the LFL number of transactions continued to increase year-on-year. On the expansion side, we added a record number of new projects to our development pipeline.

"LFL revenue increased by 9.2% mainly driven by the expansion of our average basket, which stood at 8.4% for the quarter. Progress in our average basket outpaced inflation trends and was supported by the growing number of items per basket. At the same time, traffic was not compromised by the strong progress on the basket side, as it grew by 0.7% in Q3.

"In July and August, we had particularly strong results in both average basket and the number of purchases, which were stimulated by a successful promotional campaign. We witnessed a slowdown in revenue progress in September, which we attribute to a stronger comparative base of 2012, when an intensive promotion was in place to mark the company's 10th anniversary and we had an additional weekend day when trading is higher."

During the period the group opened two hypermarkets and continued to work on securing new locations.

"Our development pipeline has increased significantly in Q3 2013 as we signed twelve new contracts, eight of which are for hypermarkets, two are for supermarkets and the remaining two are for the new project," it added.

At the end of September, the total number of projects reached 34 hypermarkets and 26 locations for smaller formats.

NR

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