Retail sales at Pets at Home topped £1 billion for the first time, in the 12 months to March 25, 2021, which represented growth of 8.7%.

The retailer reported group like-for-like sales growth of 8.7%; in the second half of the year, Pets at Home reported group like-for-like sales growth of 12.4%.

Omnichannel sales grew 71.7%, Pets at Home said.

Peter Pritchard, Pets at Home’s group chief executive, said: “We ended this unprecedented year a far stronger pet care business. Despite challenges to how we were able to do business, we grew our market share across all channels and our underlying growth trajectory accelerated.

“Our loyalty clubs saw record periods of new customer registration, strong growth in subscription customers increased the visibility and quality of our sales profile, whilst new clients across our veterinary estate helped increase practice profitability and cash flow.”

Mr Pritchard said COVID-19 had structurally changed the dynamics of the pet care market.

“We estimate that the rising level of pet ownership, combined with structural demand drivers such as premiumisation and humanisation, has increased the outlook for growth across our addressable market, and in conjunction with our expectations of continuing to take market share, provides a tailwind to the £600 milion customer revenue opportunity we see across our business over the medium term,” he said.

“We will, as the UK’s leading omnichannel pet care provider, capitalise on this opportunity through continued investment in our infrastructure, further digitising our business and leveraging our extensive and unique dataset to provide insight throughout the customer lifetime to support investment decision-making that will drive quality and profitable growth.”