By: Staff Writer - MyBroadband

South African fashion, home, and grocery retailer Woolworths saw online sales surge during the first half of its 2024 financial year.

For the 26 weeks ending 24 December 2024, online sales in the fashion, beauty and home categories climbed by 26.9% and contributed 5.4% of South African sales.

Online food sales jumped 46.6%, driven primarily by the retailer’s Woolies on-demand delivery service Dash increasing its coverage.

During the period, 5.1% of the retailer’s food sales were from online orders.

Woolies Dash was launched in December 2020 to compete with Shoprite Checkers’ Sixty60 and Pick n Pay’s Bottles, which has since been rebranded PnP Asap!.

Spar has also since launched its on-demand delivery service, Spar 2U.

Sixty60 is South Africa’s most successful on-demand grocery delivery service and is Dash’s biggest competition.

Shoprite has increasingly focused on improving some of its stores and product offerings to cater to more affluent South Africans, Woolies’ primary target market.

During Shoprite’s last reported half-year financial results for the period ending 31 December 2023, Sixty60’s sales increased by 63.1% year-on-year.

That impressive growth came despite Sixty60 being more widely adopted than Woolies Dash.

Woolworths profit crashes due to David Jones disposal

On the whole, the Woolworths Group’s turnover and concession sales from continuing operations increased by 5.4% to R38.1 billion during the latest interim period.

However, this excludes the impact of the disposal of the high-end clothing brand David Jones.

Woolworths said that its latest results were not comparable to the previous period due to this disposal.

Including the David Jones business in the previous period, turnover and concession sales actually declined by 23.6%.

When including the David Jones business during the previous period, profit declined by 33.5%, coming down from R2.7 billion.

Excluding David Jones, the group’s profit from continuing operations plummeted 10.9% from R2 billion to R1.8 billion.