Domino's Pizza shares fall as directors pocket £12m

Shares in Domino's Pizza eased after two directors at the pizza delivery group sold a combined total of more than £12m in shares.

Chairman Stephen Helmsley offloaded 1m shares at 450p a time and now has just under 4m shares or about 2.4% of the company.

Non-executive director Nigel Wray sold 1.7m shares at the same price, but still has about 16.6m, more than 10% of the company.

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Shares in Domino's were above 500p earlier in the year, but have fallen sharply since last month when it posted a strong rise in revenues for the 13 weeks to 25 September, but saw sales growth slow on a like-for-like basis (stripping out the impact of new store openings).

The pizza deliverer's sales during the period climbed to £127m from £115.7m, bringing sales for the year to date so far up to £385.4m, a 9.2% rise from £352.8m the previous year.

Like-for-like sales in the 13 week period were up by 3.9%, compared with growth of 9.9% in the previous period.

Domino's has the franchise to operate the Domino's Pizza brand, which began in the US, in the UK and Ireland. Ireland has been a particularly tough market for the company due to the economic crisis in the Eurozone country.