LONDON (ShareCast) - (ShareCast News) - Majestic Wine's retail business had its biggest Christmas ever with sales up 7.5% as overall revenue grew.


For the 10-week Christmas period ending 2 January revenue climbed 15.3% compared to the prior year, while on an underlying basis it increased 12.4%. Christmas delivers about 30% of the company's sales for the year.

Its retail business, Majestic Retail experienced its biggest Christmas ever with like-for-like sales up 7.5%, on top of 7.3% LFL growth last year. About 0.5% of this was one-off due to transfer of sales from closed stores.

The gross margin was around one percentage point lower due to new customers and the "need to remain competitive in a heavily discounted UK market still coming to terms with recent currency movements".

The AIM-listed company said that its profits are expected to be in line with market expectations.

Revenue for its Naked Wines business jumped 29.9% and for its Lay & Wheeler business soared 62.3%, but sales in Majestic Commercial fell 0.8%.

Chief executive Rowan Gormley said it was particularly pleasing that both Naked Wines and Majestic Commercial traded in line with expectations and Lay & Wheeler has maintained its strong growth.

"Our transformation plan is working and we remain on track to achieve our £500m sales goal. We said that we would be better prepared for Christmas than ever - and the numbers show that we did what we said we would do. At this stage we are not predicting a change to long term margin expectations, but we need to retain flexibility to compete in a competitive market."

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