Home » Posts tagged 'marks and spencer' (Page 2)
Tag Archives: marks and spencer
Sports Direct Disappoints – Targets For Staff Rewards To Be Reduced
Sports Direct SPD has not had a good year. It openly admits that the year to 24th April was disappointing, so disappointing in fact that it failed to reach the targets for the share based incentive scheme for eligible staff which is part of the company’s “high performance and reward culture”. So what are they going to do about it. No problem, easy – they are going to change the incentive scheme by making it easier to reward staff who haven’t produced the necessary results. Of course it wasn’t really the staff’s fault that targets weren’t met this year, it was because of tough trading conditions in the second half and tough trading conditions are as we all know completely outside the control of any company.
Preliminary results show group revenue rose by 2.5% but underlying profit before tax was down by 8.4% and earnings per share by 8.7%.
Marks & Spencer MKS had a fairly disastrous third quarter except in food where sales rose by 4% and strongly outperformed the market but even there, on a like for like basis they fell by 0.9%. Clothing and home sales fell by a whopping 8.3% but that was part of a deliberate policy to increase sales eventually. When “eventually” will arrive is not specified. Overall UK sales for the quarter to 2nd July fell by 1.1%. From my visit to M&S yesterday, any company which thinks it can get away with charging 24.99 Euro for a 3 pack of underpants, is living in cloud cuckoo land, especially when you have to queue for the privilege of paying for them.
Find Villas & Houses For Sale In Greece; http://www.hiddengreece.net
Retailers On The Rebound
Marks & Spencer MKS what a pleasure it is to see a shopkeeper back in charge of Marks and not just any old shopkeeper but one who knows the business inside out, one who has started turning it round in a very short time and who sounds confident and is confident that he can do the job.
The first sign of his success is continuing strong growth in food plus the realisation that sales performance in Home and Clothing has been unsatisfactory and the determination to rectify it. Profit before tax for the 53 weeks to the 2nd April is down 18.5% and basic earnings per share by 16.2% but a final dividend of 11.9% makes an increase for the full year of 3.9%. Confidence in the future means that a special dividend of 4.6p for the first half of the current year will be payable in July. Central to Steve Rowe’s recovery plans is that Marks will put customers back at the heart of the business which is bad news for the Greek stores who may now be forced to start offering customer service occasionally.
Dixons Carphone DC has enjoyed a strong fourth quarter to finish off a very strong year. Like for Like revenue rose by 5% both for the quarter and for the year, with market share gains in the UK & Ireland, the Nordics and Greece. The UK and Ireland had an excellent year with like for like revenue up by 6%. Profit before tax is expected to have risen by 17% over last year.
Babcock BAB is raising its dividend for the year to 31st March by 9% after rises of 5% in profit before tax, 4% in revenue and 8% in basic earnings per share. It claims that it is well positioned for future growth and that the order book and bidding pipeline are impressive. 78% of revenue for the current year is already in place and 53% for 2017/18
Petra Diamonds PDL Christies Magnificent Jewels auction on the 9th June, will include the largest Fancy Intense Blue Diamond ever to be auctioned. Petra expects the 24.18 carat stone to fetch between $23 -$29 million. Petra’s share price now standing at 119p has more than doubled since November.
Find Beachfront Property For Sale In Greece; http://www.hiddengreece.net
Retailers (Part 1) There’s No ‘Flys’ on Tesco
Tesco has problems but they are management problems which can be resolved if it can find a management team able enough to erase the long standing failures of the Leahy team which was directly responsible for Tesco’s current woes. Silly as it may seem, it may be best to get a grocer in and sack all the accountants and number crunchers. Once a retailer becomes as big as Tesco, it is the little things which count and it is the little things which they ignore because they have arrived and believe that nobody can knock them off their pedestal.
Marks made the same mistake and Asda and Walmart are following suit. But as far as Asda is concerned there is no Archie Norman in sight, to save them this time round. The worst offender is, believe it or not, Lidl,
Tesco first. Everything I have bought from Tesco has been wrong and should have been returned but I bought them on line, Greece not being blessed with even a Tesco Tiny or whatever the latest name is for its attempts to try and retrieve its lost shoppers. I bought two pairs of Jeans – they were excellent apart from one thing – the button flies. The problem was very simple, the buttons did not match up with the button holes – on either pair. That may be a little mistake but it can have big consequnces standing in some unlit loo on a dark night at the back of a grotty taverna trying to force the metal buttons out of a button hole which is misaligned and a bit too small in any event.
And then there are the underpants. Now M&S underpants in Greece are 25 Euro per pack of three and Tescos seemed a bargain by comparison but again they had the same problem, the flies. The inward fly entrance did not match up with the exit fly so that it was virtually impossible to put the hand in and retrieve the required body part, without twisting it in two. Imagine however if, in addition to the underpants, you were also wearing a pair of the button fly jeans. You had to struggle with buttons to gain access to the underpants and then found it virtually impossible to get through the underpants to access the, by now, urgently needed organ. And all because Tesco had gone ahead and bought no doubt hundreds and thousands of the offending articles without bothering to test the design. They must have been the only superrmarket in Europe trying to palm off underpants which didn’t work. Now their business is crumbling and they can’t understand why. I can.
Part 2 of this thrilling expose will appear tomorrow.
Looking for villas and houses for sale in Greece – visit; http://www.hiddengreece.net