Good morning! It's busy for results statements today, and next week looks extremely busy too, so let's crack on.
Majestic Wine (LON:MJW)
At £331m market cap (506p per share) it's not really a small cap, but I suspect that valuation may drop today. This wine emporium usually puts out decent trading statements, but not today. In this morning's update the company says that trading conditions in calendar 2014 to date have been challenging.
It has a 31 March 2014 year-end, so with two weeks to go, LFL sales and profits are now expected to be flat against last year. The last update on 8 Jan 2014 indicated that LFL sales were up 0.8% for the first 40 weeks of the year, so it's not a disaster, but by my rough calculations, I reckon that probably means Jan-Mar this year is likely to have been negative by say 3-4% on a LFL (like-for-like basis). LFL strips out the impact of new shop openings, and closures, thereby being the best measure of underlying sales performance.
It looks to be an undershoot of about 10% on profit expectations, which is surprising coming so late in the year, and I think could knock the shares by 10-20% today, at a guess.
So that means EPS has been flat at about 26p for three years. It's difficult to see why the PER should be much more than about 10-12, if this is now going to struggle to make any headway, which would imply a share price around 260-310p. Therefore it hardly looks a bargain even at this morning's current price (at 08:08) of 425p. I'm not tempted to catch this falling knife, although have added it to my watchlist.
Increased costs are expected in 2014/15 for various reasons, and the outlook sounds hesitant;
...the Board now anticipates a flatter profit growth profile in the 2015 financial year.
Maybe the supermarkets are squeezing Majestic? Although I note they claim to have maintained market share.
WANdisco (LON:WAND)
This seems to be a fashionable technology share, where usual conventions on performance and valuation don't seem to apply. The company cheerfully reports what they describe as a "highly…
