Tesco celebrates busy Christmas

Jan 12 2010 By nebusiness

Tesco hailed its strongest Christmas performance in three years today as recession-weary customers bought festive treats and its bumper voucher handout paid off.

The supermarket said like-for-like sales in the six weeks to January 9 grew 4.9%, excluding petrol and adjusted for the change in VAT.

It said its Finest range was a "real winner", growing 16%, while 35% more bottles of Champagne were sold than last year.

Tesco handed out around £100m in extra loyalty vouchers before Christmas and the firm said around £40m worth of those were redeemed.