IT has been a rotten Christmas for Littlewoods.

The High Street stores and home shopping group saw like-for-like sales rise by just 2% in the nine weeks to January 2, adding to the evidence that most retailers have had a poor festive season.

The result at Littlewoods represents a distinct slowing on the 8% improvement seen in the first half of the current 1998-99 financial year.

The High Street business posted the stronger performance, with its sales up by 3% while the home shopping or mail order activities' sales rose by a slender 1%.

Littlewoods' stores include its Index catalogue showrooms as well as menswear and

womenswear shops.

It is only the second big name to report its Christmas trading experience.

On Wednesday, the Next chain announced a strong recovery from the comparable period a year earlier with its sales in the High Street up 13.5% and like-for-like sales ahead by 2.5% instead of the setback many analysts had

expected.

Littlewoods chief executive Barry Gibson said the run-up through the autumn to Christmas was the worst he had experienced in 30 years of retailing. Electronic goods and mobile phones in

particular had been a strong

market but textiles were dull.

That reflected the much milder than usual winter in most of the UK.

However, Littlewoods has begun 1999 with a relatively tight stock position and has no real concerns about marking prices down.

The Littlewoods experience is much in line with the findings of the Confederation of British Industry Distributive Trades

Survey for December which revealed that volumes had risen slightly during the month.

Some 41% of respondents said that sales volumes had risen, offset by 37% experiencing a deterioration.

However, the positive balance of four for December contrasts with the minus of eight in November and minus four in October, with the net effect being that the three monthly average year-on-year has been broadly flat.

The most dire experiences have been in the furniture and carpet stores, with a balance of 78% of retailers pointing to a decline. Confectioners have experienced a similar fate.

But there seems some relief for the hard-pressed shoe industry with a 73% positive balance and an improvement in sales for the past four months in a row.

That could partly be caused by the reduction in the number of outlets benefiting the remainder.

Booksellers and stationers have also performed well as underlined by the 11.4% rise in like-for-like sales at Clinton Cards.

This is just a touch behind the 11.8% gain seen in 1997 at the established shops - which totalled 518 at the end of the year - but excluding the 206 Greetings Store Group shops acquired in October.

The success of the home

electronics sector was underlined by Electronics Boutique which said that overall sales were ahead by 31% and same store turnover by 11%.

There was an especially good performance from the Sony Playstations and video games - this could be a pointer to John Menzies which may well have had a similar success with its THE games subsidiary which handles Nintendo software.

Menzies half-time results are due on January 21.