Two months after U.K. appliance and electronics retailer Dixons Retail PLC and the mobile phone retailer Carphone Warehouse Group merged to become Dixons Carphone PLC, the newly united company says its marriage is off to a strong start.
“The business is in robust good shape,” says group CEO Sebastian James. “We’ve been supported by a good market environment.”
The company says it has been particularly successful on the e-commerce front when it comes to merging the two brands into one.
“When we analyze the flow from Dixons into Carphone, 70% of those visitors had never been on that web site before,” says group strategy director Andrew Lawley. “We’ve had a flow of 165,000 unique visitors to and through each other’s web sites, which is excellent.”
Dixons is No. 13 on Internet Retailer’s 2014 Europe 500, having done €1.474 billion in web sales in 2013, according to Internet Retailer’s Top500Guide.com, an increase of 14.3% from €1.289 billion in 2012. Carphone is No. 27, having done an estimated €710 million in web sales in 2013, up 15.3% from €615.8 million in 2012.
Group CEO Sebastian James says the company benefitted from back-to-school and the iPhone 6 launches, which both occurred within the company’s first few months.
“We are very happy with the way back to school went for us, we’re very happy with the way iPhone 6 is going for us,” he says.
Lawley acknowledged that the e-commerce side of things remains in its infancy and there is still a lot of room to grow.
“We’ve had cross-merchandising in place from closing so traffic can flow from one site to another,” Lawley says. “Getting that cross sale working is really important. One of the real drivers behind that is releasing a click and collect model where we can take advantage of a much more convenient and enlarged estate. There are plans being developed to bring that in next year.”
There’s also the matter of working out the personnel end of things.
James says his biggest focus is going to be on talent management, ensuring the best employees have a productive and happy work environment to succeed in.
“The most difficult part of any integration is negotiating and navigating through the desire to keep the best of the talent that we have and make sure the people that we like are nurtured and feel very motivated,” James says. ”We’re navigating that part, I hope, quite well.”
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