Good morning, it's Paul here with the SCVR for Thursday.
We'll do what we can. It's all a bit difficult at the moment, isn't it! Ploughing through results statements is the last thing I want to do at times like this, when we're all worrying about our own shrinking portfolios. Never mind. See the header above for the companies I'll be covering today.
Estimated time of completion - a bit later today, by 3pm.
EDIT: I've just got a text reminding me that they're fitting my apartment with a smart meter, so I won't have any electricity for a couple of hours. This will delay me. Hence revised completion time of 5pm. Sorry about that.
EDIT at 17:30 -today's report is now finished.
Still, we need to keep focused on the fact that times like this do throw up interesting opportunities, as well as causing pain.
Topps Tiles (LON:TPT)
Share price: 59.3p (down 25%, at 10:15)
No. shares: 195.0m
Market cap: £115.6m
Trading update (profit warning)
Topps Tiles Plc is the UK's largest specialist supplier of tiles and associated products, targeting the UK domestic refurbishment and commercial market and serving a retail and trade customer base from 361 nationwide retail stores and four commercial showrooms.
I last reported on TPT's figures here on 8 Jan 2020. Whilst the sales performance for Q1 (Oct-Dec 2019, as it has a Sept 2020 year end) was poor, at -5.4%, the company was able to point to a big improvement within the quarter (LFL sales down -7.2% in the first 8 weeks, bouncing back to -1.4% in the last 5 weeks of Q1). Therefore, weak sales looked like a blip, perhaps caused by the political uncertainty prior to the 13 Dec 2019 election result.
Unfortunately, we're told today that the sales trend has deteriorated again, to -5.5% LFL sales in the 8 weeks to 22 Feb 2020 (Q2 to date). As we know, a decline in sales at high margin retailers, feeds through to a geared impact on profits. It's fairly easy to set up a simple spreadsheet to model this. Consequently;
With most of the period complete, the Group now expects that first half profit will be significantly below the prior year level. As a result, management expect adjusted profit before tax for the 53 weeks ended 3 October 2020 will be materially below the bottom…
