Asos, Sports Direct and Home Retail results stronger – but this is a success for e-street not the high street
We've seen trading updates from a host of retailers this morning.
Asos saw full year pre-tax profits beat consensus forecasts, Home Retail's Homebase and Argos saw like-for-like sales up 5.9 per cent and 2.3 per cent respectively in 26 weeks, and Sports Direct saw total sales up by 15.1 per cent in nine.
But don't be caught into thinking that these are signs of a high street renaissance – if anything these results provide evidence that more of us are moving from town centres to our living rooms and making purchases online.
Neil Shah, analyst at Edison Investment Research says that each of those trading updates "point to a revived retail sector" but that this is "down to retailers' success on e-street and increasing mobile phone shopping".
Shah points to the adoption of a click and collect model at Argos and Homebase, in order to capture what is a relatively static overall consumer spend that is shifting its shopping online.
This week data from the British Retail Consortium showed that more customers are moving to smart devices to make purchases, with British retailers seeing customers move to using smartphones and tablets to buy via the web.