Photograph: Francois Lenoir/Reuters
Shoppers with a penchant for meatballs and mattresses have helped flatpack furniture firm Ikea report a surge in UK sales.
The Swedish homeware company racked up revenues of nearly £1.6bn in the year to the end of August, 11.3% more than the previous year.
It also took a bigger slice of the UK market, up 0.5% to 7.7%, dealing a blow to John Lewis’s hopes of knocking it off the top spot among home and furniture retailers.
Ikea attributed some of the bounce to a range of new mattresses, sales of which were up by 30% over the year.
It also enjoyed an 11% bump in the sale of Swedish food products, including its well-known meatballs and its recently introduced veggie balls.
An effort to appeal to people on a tight budget saw the company invest £27m in price cuts, a strategy it said had paid off.
The biggest single price cut last year was on the Friheten corner sofa-bed, which became the year’s best seller after it was reduced from £445 to £395.
Sales through its website, which will be overhauled next year, were up by nearly 30%, compared to in-store sales that increased by 9%.
Ikea’s UK boss, Gillian Drakeford, said a fourth consecutive year of sales growth would allow Ikea to press on with expansion plans. She said: “This puts us in a great position to continue to grow Ikea’s physical presence in the UK.”
The Swedish firm will open its first new major store for seven years in Reading next summer and has also launched a trial of smaller “click and collect” stores, the first of which opened in Norwich this month.
A second is due to open in Aberdeen next spring, while the company has also explored the possibility of moving into the BHS building on London’s Oxford Street.
Rising sales in the UK mirrored a broader increase in the group’s worldwide revenues, which it said earlier this year were up 5% to €32bn (£22.5bn).
Ikea is pushing towards a revenue target of €50bn by 2020, with much of its growth fuelled by new stores in China and Russia.
Ikea won praise earlier this year when it became the first large national retailer to commit to paying staff the Living Wage of £9.15 an hour in London and £7.85 across the UK from April.
