No sign of holiday slump for UK retailers

LONDON - As the pre-Christmas scramble on the high street gives way to a stampede to the sales, the early signs are that the holiday shopping season may not have been as bad as some analysts had feared.

None of the top listed retailers will provide firm data on the crucial Christmas period until January, when the winners and losers of the annual spending frenzy will emerge.

Interest rates at their highest level in three years, a levelling-out in house prices and easing consumer confidence have been seen as gloomy portents for some of the more vulnerable retail chains.

But despite stern warnings from the Financial Services Authority that retailers should disclose poorer-than-expected trading performance immediately, none did so on Wednesday or Thursday -- their first opportunities to fess up.

WH Smith, the stationer and bookseller regarded by some as a likely candidate for a warning on profit and sales, told Reuters on Thursday it had no plans to make any announcement before its scheduled statement on January 27.

Other top retailers, requesting anonymity, said no such warnings were planned. This hardly translates into a guarantee of a bumper Christmas, but it's a lot more than some had feared.

"Christmas came and Christmas went, and no one's warned on profits yet. While my instinct is still that there are going to be clear winners and losers, the sales are busy and it's not looking as bad as some people thought," a source at one of the country's top listed retailers said.

Figures from retail information group FootFall show a clear pattern -- a slow build-up in consumer spending over late November and early December, followed by a rush to the shops in hopes of price-slashing by desperate retailers.

These panic sales never occurred, but there are signs the sales period is busier than usual -- FootFall said that shopper numbers for the first three days of the sales were over 2 per cent higher than in the same period last year.

"With Boxing Day falling on a Sunday this year, many stores opted to start their sales with a long trading day on December 27," analyst Sheelah Turner said.

"Although the pre-Christmas trading frenzy has quietened slightly, shopper volumes are still up on last year -- consumer confidence and Christmas festivity rolling over into the early sales," she said.

With virtually every non-food retailer discounting heavily to clear out Christmas lines, John Lewis, the unlisted department store group, said its annual "Clearance" sale had got off to a strong start.

Sales in the first three days of the clearance were 11 per cent higher than in the equivalent period last year.

Certainly, internet retailers like Amazon seem to have had a festive time of it, despite widespread reports of delivery problems in the days before December 25.

With an estimated one pound in every 40 now spent online, retail analysts Verdict estimated that internet shoppers in Britain will have spent 2.6 billion pounds in the final three months of 2004, an increase of 44.5 per cent on the same period last year.

The recovery in online spending following the dotcom crash of 2000 is becoming a real threat to traditional retailers in a time of limited market growth. Dotcom expansion at this rate accounts for most or all of the 1 one or 2 per cent expansion in the retail market.

Many analysts believe that if there are to be casualties from the Christmas trading season, they will be the smaller chains like JJB Sports and Woolworths, which have faced intensifying competition from supermarket groups such as Tesco and Asda moving into general retail.

While not providing same-store data that would give a broader picture of consumer spending, Asda, owned by US Wal-Mart, the world's largest company by sales, said it had had a record Christmas.

Of 271 Asda stores, 38 generated more than 2.5 million pounds in sales in the week before Christmas, up from 22 in the same period in 2003.

And in a highly significant statistic, the company said it had sold enough radio-controlled Hummer 4-wheel-drive toy cars to create a traffic jam the length of Hadrian's Wall -- or 117km.

- REUTERS