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The iPhone and the avalanche of competing touch-screen mobile phones with a dizzying array of applications have saved Carphone Warehouse from a fall in sales.
The slump in consumer spending and saturation of the mobile phone market had led some in the City to fear for the future of Carphone, Europe's largest retailer of handsets.
But the company today said revenues of £773 million gave it underlying like-for-like retail sales over the last trading quarter, up 0.2% year-on-year. While that is down from the 1.1% reported for the year to the end of March, it is a result which Carphone's founder and chief executive Charles Dunstone admitted he did not think he'd see.
“I'm very relieved to be able to report what we're reporting,” said Dunstone ahead of the annual meeting of shareholders today.
“Frankly I'd have paid you last October [at the height of the banking crisis] if you could promise our first quarter would turn out this way.”
He continued: “The iPhone has had a massive effect on sales and it's had a massive effect on other handset manufacturers, who have been encouraged to innovate.
“The market remains very vibrant and is changing dramatically with smart phones growing fast and people expecting more from their phone than just phone calls and text messaging.
“High-tier phone features are increasingly cascading into the mid tier range as technology becomes cheaper and touch-screen phones gain in popularity.
“Very aspirational, highly featured, highly priced phones are becoming more mass market, and are typically now 50% cheaper than when they came out.”
Dunstone told shareholders the demerger of Carphone Warehouse from its sister company, the broadband and home telephone provider TalkTalk is on track for next year when he will step back and become chairman of both companies. TalkTalk, which has just acquired the UK internet connections business of Tiscali having already bought up the UK end of AOL, reported a 2% fall in sales to
£340 million despite an increase of 47,000 new customers to takes its total broadband numbers to 2.85 million.
That, Dunstone explained, is down to migrating legacy higher-charged dial-up customers to broadband.
