Domino’s grabs slice of the action: Digital drive and World Cup orders help pizza maker shrug off inflation and recession fears
Fast-food giant Domino’s Pizza pulled through 2022 relatively unscathed with marginally lower profit, as a partnership with Just Eat and the Football World Cup boosted orders.
The pizza delivery favourite reported system sales of £1.46bn in 2022, slightly down from the previous year’s £1.49bn.
Its group revenue was at £600m, up on last year’s £560m, and significantly increased from £508m in 2019 before pandemic restrictions.
Domino’s announced a dip in earnings however, with its underlying intake before tax sitting at £130m, down from £136m last year, and its profit before tax 13 per cent down on 2021,, at £98.9m.
It stressed the business is now nearly totally online, and “asset light”, with 90 per cent of sales being digital and app orders as a percentage of online orders increased by more than 50 per cent.
With more than 6m people having downloaded the app, it said collections had grown to 22.3m orders last year, up by a third on 2021.
Despite this, the company said it had “excellent momentum” through the last quarter of 2022, which included like for like system sales increased by almost 14 per cent on the previous year.
Domino’s also ate into the UK takeaway market by eight per cent in the last three months of 2022, up from 6.8 per cent in 2021, as the firm was listed on delivery giants Just East.
It also said the Fifa World Cup in Qatar boosted its business with orders at around 18.5m in the final quarter of the year, the highest ever.
Looking ahead to the rest of 2023, Domino’s recognised the “challenging consumer and inflationary environment” which has hit some of its sales.
It said there would an impact on its earnings of about £9m from technology changes to its platform, as it enters its “third year of our growth strategy” focusing on five key areas, including profitability of its franchise partners.
“Our asset-light business model and value proposition mean we are well placed to succeed in a challenging trading environment” it said.
Elias Diaz Sese, its interim chief executive heralded the “reset of the relationship with our franchise partners in December 2021 .. underpinned our strong performance in what has been an exceptionally busy year for the business.”
“Our outstanding Q4 performance gives the business powerful momentum into this year and there’s a lot to be excited about.”