Superdry latest Christmas sales casualty among UK retailers as JD Sports defies gloom

Fashion retailers Superdry and Joules became the latest Christmas casualties of Britain’s struggling retail industry, issuing profit warnings that sent their shares plunging.

Shares in Superdry, known for its Japanese style logo designs, slumped 14% to a two-year low after it said lower-than-expected Christmas sales could wipe out pretax profit for the year to April.

Joules, famed for its hand-drawn prints, also saw its shares drop about 20% after it said profits for the year to May would be significantly below market expectations, due largely to a shortage of stock over the Christmas season.

There was better news for JD Sports. It said it had a quite a positive Christmas trading period, defying the UK retail gloom.

British retailers, from department stores to fashion brands, are battling some of the toughest trading conditions seen for a generation. Industry data published earlier in the week showed British shoppers cut back at the end of 2019, rounding off the worst year since the mid-1990s for retail sales amid uncertainty over Brexit, last month’s UK election and slowing wage growth.

Superdry co-founder Julian Dunkerton, who returned to the group after a boardroom coup in April, is overhauling product and cutting promotions in an attempt to reinvigorate the brand. He said Superdry halved the proportion of discounted sales over Christmas, benefiting both its margins and the brand.

“However this adversely affected our sales during the peak trading period given the level of promotional activity in the market,” he said.

Superdry’s revenue fell 15.8% in the 10 weeks to January 4, with poor trading in stores compounded by a near 10% decline online. It said underlying pretax profit for the year to April would be in a range of zero to £10m (€11.7m).

Analysts had forecast pretax profit of £40.5m, according to Refinitiv data, broadly in line with the previous year. Superdry said in December it had recorded its strongest online trading on Black Friday since the US November shopper promotion arrived in Britain.

But it said on Friday its return to full-price sales resulted in a lower-than-expected performance for the rest of the period, with demand particularly subdued after Christmas. Citing “exceptionally high level of clothing industry promotions,” Jefferies analysts cut their pretax profit forecast to £4.6m from £20m.

Customer reaction to the limited amounts of the new management team’s ranges had been positive, Superdry said, but the full impact would not be seen until autumn-winter 2020.

Meanwhile, JD Sports said it expected annual profit towards the upper end of the current market view on stronger demand for its gym clothing and premium-branded fashion overseas, defying the gloomy UK retail sector once again. The company’s shares were little changed in the latest session.

JD is Britain's biggest sportswear retailer and has successfully targeted younger consumers with athleisure products as sports clothing becomes more acceptable. It sells premium ranges from the likes of Nike and Adidas, and often uses exclusive products to set itself apart from rivals. The owner of Footpatrol and Cloggs expects annual headline pretax profit to be in the upper quartile of £403m and £433m.

“Against a backdrop of widely reported retail challenges in the group’s core UK market, it is encouraging to report positive like-for-like trends in the group’s global Sports Fashion fascias, particularly overseas,” the company said.

The firm has more than 2,400 stores across the world. Reuters