Online retailer AO World has announced a record turnover of £700m despite shares falling more than six per cent in early trading this morning.
The Bolton-based firm is experiencing widening losses – £12m, compared to £10.6m a year ago – which it blamed on further losses incurred in Germany and the Netherlands.
It posted total revenues of £701.2m for the year to 31 March 2017, which was up by 17 per cent year on year.
UK sales accounted for £629.7m, revenue from Europe rose 53 per cent to £71.5m, and an adjusted EBITDA for the whole group saw losses narrow by 46 per cent to £2.1m.
Chief executive Steve Caunce hailed “another year of great progress”.
He said: “In Europe, we opened our new regional distribution centre in Bergheim which will enable us to scale our European operations profitably in the years to come and have improved our gross margin, building on our relationship with suppliers.
“We have built a state-of the art recycling facility in the UK, we have added new categories to our offering in both the UK and Europe and, in launching computing, we have developed systems and infrastructure to operate a different distribution model, which we can leverage for future category roll-out across territories.
“Our customer service metrics remain exceptional across all of the countries in which we operate because we make it our mission to care more and we continue to innovate to create the best customer experience for tomorrow.
“This has helped us to continue to gain market share in our categories and countries, notwithstanding the challenging trading environment in the UK.”