Home Retail Group posted a 27 per cent rise in full-year profit as a digital push at its Argos chain and a revamp at Homebase start to bear fruit.

After tough trading during the economic downturn, in which underlying pretax profit shrank to £91 million in fiscal 2013 from £433 million five years before, the group began implementing a turnaround plan last year aimed at pushing Argos sales up 15 per cent to £4.5 billion by 2018.

Argos, which makes about 70 per cent of group revenue, is being reinvented from a catalogue firm to a digitally-led business, targeting higher sales from tablet computers and mobile phones and hoping to cash in on easy collection from its 734 stores. The group is improving its order retrieval systems and will also trial some Argos stores this year within Homebase outlets. – (Reuters)