Domino's 'now fundamentally a digital business'

"The UK business is now fundamentally a digital business, with 55.7% of delivered sales ordered online, via both web and mobile, compared to 44.3% in 2011," said CEO Lance Batchelor.  By the fourth quarter of last year, the figure had reached 60%, and "it shows little sign of slowing down", he added. Overall, online system sales increased by 46.3% to £268.6m in 2012. In total, 19.7% of online orders were taken through a mobile device, almost double that in 2011.

"In one recent week we had a dozen stores receiving over 80% of their delivered sales online - this seems quite extraordinary, but is becoming a regular feature," said Batchelor.

In the 53 weeks ended 30 December 2012, profit before tax, excluding its new businesses in Germany and Switzerland, increased 14.2% to £49.7m. A record 69 new stores opened in the period with two closures making a total of 805 stores operating in four countries for the UK based operation.

However, bad weather has hit performance at the styart of 2013, Batchelor said. In the first seven weeks of 2013  like-for-like sales in UK were up by only 1.6%. "Widespread snow in week three and week four has had an adverse impact on trading. During these two weeks, we had a total of 498 stores closed at some point - almost two-thirds of our UK store network was impacted. Excluding the days these stores were closed, the underlying like-for-like sales run rate was 2.6% which is an encouraging early trend," he said.

Stores in the Republic of Ireland were not affected by the snow and saw like-for-like sales up 3.9%.

Domino's sold 61 million pizzas during 2012, he said, and had created over 1,500 new jobs.