Domino's Pizza boasted of being one of the biggest growth stories on the high street as it racked up more sales records from its UK stores.
The delivery chain took an all-time high of £14.1 million during one week in December, with established stores averaging weekly sales of £20,903. Like-for-like sales rose 7% last year, helping profits to rise 11% to £50.4 million.
The progress in the UK, where up to 23 orders a second were transacted through its website, has offset the company's struggles in Germany.
Its initial strategy of rapid store expansion resulted in big losses before Domino's decided to slow store growth until the losses declined.
The German division made a £7 million loss last year but chairman Stephen Hemsley said he remained optimistic over its prospects.
A write-down on the value of its German assets cost £19.6 million last year, meaning group profits halved to £21.6 million. However the figure without loss-making operations in Germany and Switzerland rose 11.6% to £55.2 million.
The group, which has 858 mainly franchised stores in the UK, Ireland, Germany and Switzerland, sold 65.5 million pizzas last year and created over 1,500 jobs.
In the UK, where the first site opened in Luton in 1985, orders rose 4.1% as the business benefited from increased website traffic, its use of text message marketing and new product launches.
It said an increase of 1.2% in the items per order reflected success in bundling offers to give better value and target family meals more successfully.
Mr Hemsley added: "At the heart of the group's story in 2013 is some very powerful growth in our core UK market, where like-for-like sales growth accelerated to 7%, surely one of the strongest growth stories on the UK high street."
The figure has improved to 14.6% in the first few weeks of the new financial year, although this is against softer comparisons with a year earlier.
Why are you making commenting on The Herald only available to subscribers?
It should have been a safe space for informed debate, somewhere for readers to discuss issues around the biggest stories of the day, but all too often the below the line comments on most websites have become bogged down by off-topic discussions and abuse.
heraldscotland.com is tackling this problem by allowing only subscribers to comment.
We are doing this to improve the experience for our loyal readers and we believe it will reduce the ability of trolls and troublemakers, who occasionally find their way onto our site, to abuse our journalists and readers. We also hope it will help the comments section fulfil its promise as a part of Scotland's conversation with itself.
We are lucky at The Herald. We are read by an informed, educated readership who can add their knowledge and insights to our stories.
That is invaluable.
We are making the subscriber-only change to support our valued readers, who tell us they don't want the site cluttered up with irrelevant comments, untruths and abuse.
In the past, the journalist’s job was to collect and distribute information to the audience. Technology means that readers can shape a discussion. We look forward to hearing from you on heraldscotland.com
Comments & Moderation
Readers’ comments: You are personally liable for the content of any comments you upload to this website, so please act responsibly. We do not pre-moderate or monitor readers’ comments appearing on our websites, but we do post-moderate in response to complaints we receive or otherwise when a potential problem comes to our attention. You can make a complaint by using the ‘report this post’ link . We may then apply our discretion under the user terms to amend or delete comments.
Post moderation is undertaken full-time 9am-6pm on weekdays, and on a part-time basis outwith those hours.
Read the rules hereComments are closed on this article