David Jones a major seller of appliances is set to expand both branded and house branded appliance ranges in Australia while also expanding their food offering.
The expansion will be part of a major restructure of the department store retailer who earlier this week reported sales growth of 6.4%.
Ian Moir, the boss of South Africa’s Woolworths Holdings, the new owners of David Jones has said that the Company has grown sales during the past 12 months and that food and appliances are part of their expansion plans moving forward.
There has been no comment about the relationship with Dick Smith who offer a Dick Smith range of consumer electronics goods to David Jones customers from Dick Smith branded stores located inside the department store retailer.
ChannelNews understands that Dick Smith will shortly start rolling out appliances at select Dick Smith stores.
Woolworths Holdings posted its full-year sales results earlier this week, revealing David Jones – which it took control of on August 1 last year – had shifted gear under its ownership, especially in the second half.
David Jones recorded full-year sales growth of 6.4 per cent while comparable store sales growth was up 3.7 per cent – double the pace of Myer.
“It’s not hard to compute from those numbers that we are actually in double-digit figures for the ?second half, total sales.
“That’s actually an exciting result for us and that was driven not by markdowns, as some have suggested, but largely by us getting better – understanding customers better, having clearer segmentation within the stores, having better product offer, better availability, better customer service in store, which is very important to us, and just getting some of the ?basics of retail right.” Moir said.
Now almost a year after outlaying $2.1 billion for David Jones, Woolworths is preparing to sell two of its landmark central business district stores to fund hundreds of millions of dollars of investment in IT systems, stores and new food venues which will also sell small appliances and food ware.
Moir has confirmed that David Jones was close to making a decision to sell one of its two Sydney CBD stores and one of its two Melbourne stores in deals which could raise almost $400 million.
It’s fair to say that. there was significant underinvestment in the systems in David Jones.
