The growth of El Corte Inglés, whose department stores still have a big share of the Spanish sporting goods market, slowed down to 2 percent in the financial year ended Feb. 28, reaching a level of €15.50 billion.
Marking the third year of its financial recovery, the group's Ebitda improved by 7.5 percent to €981 million, while net earnings rose by 2.4 percent to €162 million. After amortization and depreciation, the operating profit (Ebit) grew by 6.8 percent to €319 million. The outlook for the current financial year is positive in terms of sales and profits, said the management, based on the results of the first six month.
The department stores of El Corte Inglés, which represented 62.7 percent of the group's revenues, experienced a sales increase of 2.8 percent to €9.72 billion. Their Ebitda grew by 20.6 percent to more than €652 million.
In the past year, El Corte Inglés obtained a €116 million loan from the European Investment Bank to help finance the establishment of a new integrated online sales platform to boost its omni-channel operations, creating better synergies with its physical stores, and to improve distribution processes.
The company noted that its online sales grew last year twice as fast as the Spanish market with increases of 60 percent in orders, 40 percent in turnover and 25 percent in traffic on its websites.
According to the eShow Magazine, El Corte Inglés had 6.8 million unique monthly visitors last year in Spain, coming in third place after Amazon with its 14.1 million visitors. Decathlon came in sixth place after Carrefour and Mediamarkt with 3.8 million monthly visitors. The average ticket was €186 at El Corte Inglés, compared with €100 at Amazon as well as Decathlon and Adidas. With an average ticket of €120, a Spanish online sports retailer, Deporvillage, came just below Nike's average online ticket of €113 in Spain.
