WH Smith shrugged off a tenth successive year of falling Christmas sales as it highlighted a "good profit performance" driven by a continued squeeze on costs.
Like-for-like sales were down 4% for the 20 weeks to January 18. They have been consistently negative for this period since 2005 but the retailer's strategy of focusing instead on margins is admired by City analysts.
Its 615 high street stores saw a fall of 6% but WH Smith said there was good margin improvement and costs were tightly managed.
In the retailer's travel division, which has 673 units at airports, railway stations and motorway services, like-for-like sales were down 1%, again with margin improvement, and a store opening programme progressing well.
The group said it had identified further opportunities for growth in both the UK and abroad.
It also began to deliver on its pledge of returning £50 million of cash to investors, buying 1.6 million shares at an average price of £9.57 - after last year reporting annual profits up 6% to £108 million.
Chief executive Stephen Clarke said: "During the period we have delivered another good profit performance across the group with costs tightly controlled and further improvement in gross margin.
"Looking ahead, we continue to plan cautiously and manage the business tightly while investing in new opportunities for future growth. We are confident in making further progress in the year."
WH Smith slashed £18 million of costs from its high street network during 2012/13 and has said it is targeting a further £22 million savings over the following three years.
The chain has weathered the downturn with the help of "impulse" offers such as a free bottle of water with the Telegraph newspaper, while shifting its focus away from lower-margin CDs and DVDs towards books and stationery.
Shares opened more than 2% higher today, with analysts at Cantor Fitzgerald Stockbrokers sticking by their forecast for profits of £108 million in the current financial year.
Why are you making commenting on The Herald only available to subscribers?
It should have been a safe space for informed debate, somewhere for readers to discuss issues around the biggest stories of the day, but all too often the below the line comments on most websites have become bogged down by off-topic discussions and abuse.
heraldscotland.com is tackling this problem by allowing only subscribers to comment.
We are doing this to improve the experience for our loyal readers and we believe it will reduce the ability of trolls and troublemakers, who occasionally find their way onto our site, to abuse our journalists and readers. We also hope it will help the comments section fulfil its promise as a part of Scotland's conversation with itself.
We are lucky at The Herald. We are read by an informed, educated readership who can add their knowledge and insights to our stories.
That is invaluable.
We are making the subscriber-only change to support our valued readers, who tell us they don't want the site cluttered up with irrelevant comments, untruths and abuse.
In the past, the journalist’s job was to collect and distribute information to the audience. Technology means that readers can shape a discussion. We look forward to hearing from you on heraldscotland.com
Comments & Moderation
Readers’ comments: You are personally liable for the content of any comments you upload to this website, so please act responsibly. We do not pre-moderate or monitor readers’ comments appearing on our websites, but we do post-moderate in response to complaints we receive or otherwise when a potential problem comes to our attention. You can make a complaint by using the ‘report this post’ link . We may then apply our discretion under the user terms to amend or delete comments.
Post moderation is undertaken full-time 9am-6pm on weekdays, and on a part-time basis outwith those hours.
Read the rules hereComments are closed on this article