Good morning! Very quiet for news today, so a shortish report.
Another retailer has reported annual results:
Bonmarche Holdings (LON:BON)
Share price: 284p
No. shares: 50.0m
Market Cap: £142.1m
Final results y/e 28 Mar 2015 - this is a clothing retailer, mainly targeting middle aged & older female customers, at the value end of the market. So a less crowded part of the market than most clothing retailers which aim at younger (but often less affluent!) customers.
BON floated in late 2013, and has been a relatively successful newcomer to the market, trading at all times above its launch price of 200p. Checking back through my notes here, the shares had a bit of a wobble on 10 Apr 2015 (see my report) when it reported poor Q4 store sales (down 4.7% LFL), partly offset by good online sales. However the company reassured that it would still hit its full year numbers - so clearly management had played it safe, and kept a bit of out-performance in their back pockets, which smoothed over a softer performance in Q4.
Today we see those full year numbers, and my initial reaction is that they seem reasonable.
Revenue - up 8.7% at £178.6m, which benefitted from same store (LFL) growth of 4.0%, boosted to 6.0% once online sales are included. The balance of the increase must be down to new store openings, net of closures. This is a respectable performance in my view.
Profit before tax - it's best to focus on the pre-exceptional figure, which is £12.4m (up 10.4% on prior year). Again, a respectable performance.
The headline numbers show much bigger increases, but that is because last year's figures included a £3.3m exceptional item (which was mostly (£3.0m) cost of the IPO).
EPS - underlying basic adjusted EPS is 20.7p vs 18.6p last year.
If you want to be more prudent, then the diluted (for share options) EPS figure is 19.8p.
Dividends - a final divi of 4.5p has been proposed, taking the full year divis to 6.8p. That is a yield of 2.4% - not madly exciting, but it's almost three times covered, so should be regarded as fairly safe, and likely to continue growing.
Outlook - just general comments, but no nasties in there, so this is at least soothing:
Balance Sheet - all seems fine to me. The…
