25th Apr 2018 13:25
LONDON (Alliance News) - Crawshaw Group PLC said on Wednesday its pretax loss widened dramatically in the financial year that ended January 28 in a "challenging period".
The "value butcher" took a one-off non cash impairment charge of GBP10.6 million and GBP800,000 in exceptional costs. As a result, its pretax loss widened to GBP13.5 million from GBP1.4 million in financial 2017.
The company also posted an earnings before income, taxation, depreciation and amoritsation loss of GBP800,000, down from an EBITDA profit of GBP1.3 million the previous year.
Despite the announcement, Crawshaw's share price was up 13% to 5.12 pence each Wednesday afternoon.
The company posted a 1% increase in revenue to GBP44.6 million from GBP44.2 million. It said it "rebalanced" its portfolio towards unique factory shops as sales increased. "Challenging trading" and "sterling weakness" impacted profitablity.
Crawshaw said its new factory store sales offset the 5.4% like-for-like sales reduction in its high street estate. Its customer numbers fell 3%.
It opened five new factory shops in the year. Its factory shops trading contribute about 22% of its overall sales, up from 15% the previous year.
In the first 12 weeks of the new financial year, trading has remained "challenging", Crawshaw said, "exacerbated by recent poor weather and continued high street pressures". However, Crawshaw said that its factory shop format "continues to perform well" and that its strategy to reduce its dependency on "legacy" high street business is the "right one".
Crawshaw said it is "well advanced" in recruiting a new chief executive officer and chief financial officer after Noel Collett and Alan Richardson announced they will leave the butchers later this year.
CEO Noel Collett said: "This has been a disappointing year for group sales. Whilst we have been pleased with the strong performance of our factory shop outlets, sales across our high street estate have proven more challenging, exacerbated by the well documented high street pressures.
"Against this, however, we have made operational progress to strengthen the business. We are confident that the rollout of our unique factory shops format and improvements in profitability across the high street estate will leave the group well-placed for future growth."
Crawshaw said it will pay no final dividend, unchanged from last year. In financial 2016, Crawshaw paid a 0.47 pence final dividend.
Related Shares:
Crawshaw Group