Domino’s Pizza fails to deliver abroad

The price of shares in fast food operator Domino’s Pizza (LON:DOM) has dropped by 2.45% to 254.40p (as of 13:00 BST) after it reported a drop in international system sales during the first quarter. Overall revenues rose, driven by increases in the UK and Ireland, but the rate of improvement was less than half of what was achieved in the same period of the previous year.

Chief executive David Wild commented; “With continued like-for-like growth, the year has started well across our core UK and Republic of Ireland markets, which account for 90% of our business. Our digital expertise remains a key driver of customer engagement, with online accounting for a record 81.7% of total sales in the UK. We remain in open and ongoing dialogue with our UK franchisees, actively exploring win-win solutions for stimulating growth and new store openings.

Internationally, performance remains disappointing and trading visibility is limited. As we outlined at the full year results, we have new management in Norway, Sweden and Switzerland, and a heightened focus on store level performance. However, given persistently weak system sales in all our International markets we no longer expect this part of our business to break-even this year. We are therefore further tightening our focus on International costs and capital deployment. We will provide a further update at our first half results“.