Dixons Carphone delivers a solid first half

Tills were ringing at Dixons Carphone in 2015, as the multinational reported its first set of half yearly results since its creation.

The FTSE 100-listed electronics and travel retailer saw like-for-like revenue rise 5% over the period, to £4.39bn.

Its proforma headline profit before tax was also up, 23% to $121m, with statutory profit before tax £78m from its continuing operations.

In the report, Dixons Carphone said it had improved its market share across the UK and Ireland, Nordics, Greece and Spain markets.

"Against a broadly flat market overall and a very strong competitive period, we have seen continued like-for-like growth driven by market share gains across all territories", said group chief executive Sebastian James.

The six month period saw the first anniversary of the group's formation - the July 2014 merger of Dixons Retail and Carphone Warehouse Group.

"Our integration continues to go well and it gives me real pleasure to see the business looking and feeling like a single unit", James added.

"The vast majority of the difficult decisions have been made and implemented and we will complete this with the move of the Carphone Warehouse depot to Newark in the new year."

The report also pointed to the growth of Carphone Warehouse's British mobile network brand iD, which was launched in May and had 200,000 subscribers at the end of October.

Dixons Carphone ditched its previous mobile network brand Talkmobile earlier in 2015, selling it to Vodafone. It's understood Talkmobile had subscriber numbers in the high hundreds of thousands.

The six month period was also a time of discontinuation for much of the group's European businesses, exiting the retail market in France, Germany, the Netherlands and Portugal.

A net loss of £9m was chalked up to these discontinued operations. Last year, the businesses made a loss of £91m.

Dixons Carphone declared an interim divident of 3.25p per share, up from 2.5p last year.