Mr Price Home, the furniture, homeware and home decor chain of stores owned by listed retailer Mr Price Group, has reached the R1-billion mark in annual sales after only seven years of operations, the company announced on Tuesday.
“This is an important milestone for Mr Price Home,” said CEO Alastair McArthur. “In perspective, it took 12 years for the Mr Price apparel chain to reach R1-billion in sales, while Mr Price Home has reached the milestone in almost half the time.”
The division is an important contributor to overall Mr Price Group revenue, which stood at R2,36-billion for the six months to the end of September 2005. At the interim period, Mr Price Home reported a 26% increase in revenue to R473-million and comparable store sales growth of 16%. Unit sales were up by 8% to 13-million units.
Mr Price Home first opened a test store in 1998. The group now operates 128 stores around South Africa, in addition to more than 600 other group stores including Mr Price apparel, Sheet Street and Milady’s.
“We believed at the time of launch that the time was exactly right to introduce this concept to the South African value consumer,” said McArthur. “We stressed that a true value retailer competes not only on price, but also on quality and fashionability, and that is exactly what we have delivered in Mr Price Home.
“Our market research confirmed a big gap in the market for a value retailer of home textiles with low prices, good quality, wide assortments and fashionability. We have stuck to this formula and it has clearly worked extremely well for us.”
McArthur also revealed that the four “ultra” Mr Price Home stores opened in the latter part of 2005 have proved to be highly successful. Given this success, the company plans to open a further five ultra stores (larger than 2 000 square metres) in 2006.
McArthur confirmed that the introduction of furniture into Mr Price Home has succeeded beyond expectations and that annual sales of furniture are anticipated to exceed R200-million during 2006.
“We expect furniture to increase its contribution to the Mr Price Home business as we move into larger stores. This will allow better display of the furniture assortment and an improved customer environment.
“The positive customer response to our low-priced but well designed contemporary furniture has been very encouraging,” he concluded. — I-Net Bridge