Best ever Christmas sales boosts Sainsbury's results

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Third quarter trading statement for 14 weeks to 8 January 2011 reveals total sales and like-for-likes up.

Total sales for third quarter were up 7.5 per cent (6.0 per cent excluding fuel) and like-for-like sales for the quarter up 5.4 per cent (3.6 per cent excluding fuel).
There was two year like-for-like sales growth of 7.4 per cent excluding fuel.

Christmas week transactions hit all-time high of over 24.5 million. During the period 700,000 sq ft new space has been added, with nearly 6,000 new jobs created.
 
Sainsbury's Non-Food offer grew at three times the rate of food with Halloween, Christmas and Clothing ranges showing good growth, with lingerie and clothing accessories in particular performing well, with sales up over 45 per cent on last year.
There is strong growth rates in Home and Electrical and the company is one of the fastest growing Entertainment retailers.  For example, in its launch week, they sold one in every three copies of Shrek 4 bought in shops.  The Sainsbury's Winter Cookbook, our first for 10 years, was our third biggest selling cook book.
 
The Online and Convenience businesses continue to perform well.  The Click and Collect service is now in over 150 stores. 
The Convenience business also saw strong underlying growth, with a further 13 Locals opened in the quarter.

Justin King, Chief Executive, said, "Our strategy of providing universal customer appeal through great food at fair prices has helped Sainsbury's to deliver its best-ever Christmas resulting in like-for-like sales growth for the quarter, excluding fuel, of 3.6 per cent. We are delighted that we delivered a record Christmas performance and have grown market share over the quarter, up 0.3 per cent to 16.6 per cent.  
 
This record Christmas was delivered despite challenging weather conditions and our colleagues worked extremely hard to deliver great service to our customers, serving over 24.5 million customers in the seven days up to and including Christmas Eve. This was at the end of a quarter where we served an average of 900,000 more customers each week.  We are delighted to have offered jobs to over 2,100 of the 20,000 colleagues we recruited for temporary roles at Christmas, in addition to the creation of over 3,700 new jobs through our store development activity".

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