Dunnes Stores has continued the remarkable turnaround of its northern business to surpass £200 million in turnover for the first time since 2008.
The family-owned grocery operation has reported a 12% year-on-year rise in pre-tax profit to £22.7m for its Northern Ireland operation, making the year ending December 27 2025 the most profitable for Dunnes in the north since 2011.
It came during another year of rising turnover for the supermarket chain, which generated £204.1m in the north last year, a 7% increase on the 2024 performance.
It effectively took Dunnes Stores back to the level of profitability it enjoyed prior to a major restructuring of its business in Northern Ireland and Britain.
The 2025 accounts marked a decade since the Irish grocer initiated a four-year programme to close seven northern stores and withdraw from the market in England and Scotland completely.
The much smaller Northern Ireland domiciled business, which employs 1,263 people across 15 stores, is now as profitable as the much larger supermarket operation the Dunne family operated north of the border 14 years ago.
At its peak, Dunnes Stores (Bangor) Limited, which included the GB stores, generated between £30m and £40m in pre-tax profit for the retailer during the post-millennium Celtic Tiger era.
Under pressure from larger grocery operations, the decision to reduce the size of the business in the north and Britain resulted in several loss-making years.
The major turnaround for Dunnes Stores in the north came during the post-pandemic years, with turnover and profit significantly boosted by a popular discount voucher scheme.
While it has avoided the club card schemes popular with its competitors, Dunnes Stores’ offer of a £5 discount for every £25 spent has proved a hit with shoppers faced with the soaring food prices of recent years.
The latest annual accounts for the grocer show staff costs have also continued to rise, jumping 9% in 2025 to £22.3m, despite a small reduction in the overall headcount year-on-year from 1,268 to 1,263.
Dunnes Stores’ northern wage bill increased 7.4% to £20.2m in 2025, with ‘social welfare costs’, including National Insurance, rising 43% year-on-year to £1.7m.
The accounts show a £6m tax bill left the northern operation with a bottom-line profit of £16.7m for 2025, some 18% up on the £14m from the year earlier.
Perhaps most significantly, the net asset position of the group at the reporting date amounted to £41.7m, almost double the 2024 position of £22.9m.
Famously publicity shy, the latest accounts for Dunnes Stores’ northern entity hints at a significant store investment programme, with £7.6m of capital commitments noted on the 2025 accounts, compared to just £23,000 in 2024.
The newly published 2025 accounts, which were signed off by Dr Anne Heffernan, granddaughter of the company’s Co Down born founder Ben Dunne, state the grocer’s original 82-year-old philosophy of “Better Value”, continues to guide the family.
“The board of directors believe that this philosophy underpins the success of the business in its first 80 years and it continues to guide us into the future.”