Dixons will remain on the high street in Ireland and is considering opening more outlets despite the decision to turn it into an online brand in the UK and relabel its 190 stores as Currys.digital.
There are eight Dixons stores in Ireland, four Currys and nine PC World outlets and Declan Ronayne, general manager of DSG Retail Ireland – which owns all three brands – confirmed it is evaluating further sites.
“There’s plenty of room in bricks and mortar. I hope to be back to the market in the summer to announce store opening plans,” he said.
Ronayne hailed the decision to turn Dixons into an online operation in the UK as “an exciting and positive step” but claimed the low level of broadband adoption in Ireland meant it “doesn’t make sense at the moment to embrace a Web-only strategy”.
Asked if the Irish operation would follow its UK counterpart when broadband adoption rates reached the same level as in the UK, he replied: “Anything’s possible – we could go the same way or stay exactly the way we are.”
Ronayne dismissed the suggestion DSG had opted to keep the Dixons stores in Ireland because it was making more money in ‘rip off Ireland’ than in the UK.
“That’s simply not true. We try to keep price levels in Ireland as close as possible to the UK as we can. People often forget that VAT is 3.5 percentage points more here than in the UK.”
DSG, which employs 650 people in Ireland, recorded sales of €117m last year.
The decision to make Dixons an exclusively Web-based operation in the UK, builds on an existing e-commerce operation which claims to have “recorded more than 50 per cent year-on-year sales growth over the last four years”.
The cost of the changes is estimated to be around £7m, but DSG believes they will deliver annual savings of around £3 million.
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