By Amy Looker
Coles’ food and liquor division has performed well for parent company Wesfarmers over the last 12 months, despite a recent grilling by analysts of the company’s liquor division.
The group’s retail businesses, which include grocery, liquor, convenience and hardware, recorded combined earnings growth of 10.3 per cent to $2,794 million, more than double the rate of revenue growth.
Shares for Wesfarmers also increased from 150 cents per share last year to 165 cents per share.
The Coles food and liquor division total revenue is up 5.1 per cent to $26.5 million, however, the liquor division still faces a hard slog as it seeks to improve on results from the first half of the financial year.
“The Coles liquor business made good progress to address significant IT platform issues which affected first half performance,” the company said during the results announcement.
“The implementation of a number of improvement programs began to deliver underlying performance improvement in the second half.”
Coles liquor opened 36 stores during the past 12 month, eight of which were the big box 1st Choice format, and 27 new small format stores.
The company said during its results presentation that it plans to focus on the 1st Choice banner as it remains a key area of network optimisation. It has also recently launched firstchoiceliquor.com.au.
Wesfarmers’ managing director, Richard Goyder, described the outlook for the group as positive.
“The investments made by all our retail businesses in improving their customer offers and service, providing greater value and investing in store networks and multi-channel capabilities have positioned them well for growth.”