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Laura Ashley - Like-for-like sales up a massive 10.9% in first eight weeks

May 2012

Investing in shares may lose you all or some of your money. Past performance is no indication of future performance. Some of the shares recommended here may be small company shares, which can be relatively illiquid and hard to trade and this makes such shares more risky than other investments.

  • Epic Code:
  • ALY
  • Price:
  • 23.75p
A superb outlook statement together with full year results for the year to end January. Total sales were up just 0.3% to £286m but that was largely because Laura Ashley has continued to reduce its net selling space with the closure of six UK loss-making stores (to leave 211). Overall, pretax profit before exceptionals was down from £19.3m to £18.8m and eps were 1.8p. Dividend remained at 2p, a 9% yield.Consequently, the store closures meant that UK retail sales were down 1.5% although like-for-like sales were up 3.3% with a positive performance across most product categories. In spite of higher commodity costs, gross margin rates were steady at 44%.  You don't buy this share for the UK retail but for the royalty inc ...

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Laura Ashley - Home Strong but fashion weaker (August 2013)
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With small companies there is an above average degree of risk compared to buying blue chips. Please be aware that we have not assessed the suitability of any of these investments for you. The newsletter simply states a personal view and diarises the editor’s investment decisions. Please speak to your stockbroker or other qualified individual to ascertain whether any of these companies mentioned would form useful additions to your own portfolios. Past performance is no indication of future success.

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