Mothercare plc has announced its results for the 52 weeks period to 25th March 2017. During the year it closed 21 underperforming stores, re-sited one store and opened two new stores. The multichannel business has continued to move toward becoming digitally led and, to that end, grew its online sales by 7.8 per cent with 41 per cent of UK sales now generated online with mobile representing 83 per cent of online traffic. The retailer had launched a new responsive website which improved conversion with its upgraded app generating over one million downloads. It also focused on improving customer insight capabilities via its 3 million subject database and 4.3 million e-receipts. 40 per cent of online sales were generated by iPads in store. Internationally the business launched ten new websites and is now reaching 21 countries online
This resulted in total UK sales of £459.4 million. Mark Newton-Jones, CEO said “We are now in the third year of our turnaround and I am pleased to report that we have achieved much of what we set out to do from our six pillar strategy introduced in 2014. Whilst we are proud of what we’ve achieved to date, we believe we are only halfway through the transformation of the Mothercare brand. Our customers shop across both digital and store channels and thus we will invest in both. Digital revenue is on a trajectory to over half our turnover.”
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