Brickablity reported a good set of HY results on 12th November and the following Monday, Chair John Richards, presented at a Yellowstone Advisory webinar. The initial poll indicated that c.80% of attendees were non-holders at the start of the webinar. The strong share price performance during the webinar and feedback after the event would suggest that there are now some new shareholders on the register. It was an excellent presentation and the questions were answered very thoroughly. A recording of the webinar is available here.
John started by running through a brief history of the group which began life in 1984 as a regional brick distributor head quartered in South Wales. Rolling forward to present times, the company has full national coverage and is the country’s largest brick distributor and is also the largest towel radiator distributor. Other product areas covered are roofing products, cement fibreboards, windows, internal and external doors, fascias and soffits and guttering. In all of these areas they believe they provide expertise and technical skills to their customers and upon which their reputation is solidly built.
Looking at H1 performance starting in April, which was a difficult month, they quickly returned to profitability in May and have been profitable every month since. This performance is at similar levels to 2019 with September ahead of last year. Overall revenues fell 23.2% to £75.3m with divisionally the biggest fall in roofing where revenues fell 49.3%, followed by heating, plumbing and joinery which fell 23.5% and bricks which fell 19.7%. Adjusted EBITDA fell 23% to £8.0m and PBT fell 16.9% to £5.4m. Consistent with their policy to pay out 40% of cashflows, an interim dividend of 0.8678p was declared.
Profitability has continued to improve into the second half of the year with a recovery very much V shaped. They produced a clear graph which showed how monthly sales dropped off at the end of March and then drastically in April before bottoming out in May with continual recovery since then. The main market for Brickabilty is the housebuilder sector where housing starts took a sharp fall in the second quarter. However, Q3 forecasts are showing an upward trend and management feel this is set to continue.
Brickability is investing in a new 63k sq. foot warehouse to enable expansion in the heating, plumbing and joinery divisions as well as to help a new start-up business.…
