The clothing retailer’s 2017 has been pretty lame from a market perspective. An end of January spike towards £31 was to be its year high so far, with the stock falling to an 11 month, sub-£23 low by early July. Since then things have admittedly begun to pick up, with Ted Baker (LON:TED) climbing to a current trading price of £28.28.
While its stock has struggled, the company’s financial performance has consistently impressed. Back in January the firm posted a near 18% surge in sales for the 8 weeks to 7th January despite a ‘tough trading backdrop’, with online sales up 35% during the same period.
Ted Baker continued to defy the sector-wide trends with its full year results at the end of March. There the company revealed a 16.4% jump in group sales to £531 million, helping lead to a 4.4% rise in pre-tax profit to £65.8 million. Yet, despite these stellar numbers, investors weren’t willing to get on board, instead sending the stock 5% lower as they seemingly fretted over the health of UK consumers.
The company’s most recent update came in mid-June, on the day of its AGM. Once again Ted Baker showed its retail muscle; for the 19 weeks to 10th June online sales grew by 35.9%, while total sales rose 14.2%, with CEO Ray Kelvin claiming that he UK election boosted growth as ‘people are fed up and want a bit of fun, to go shopping’.
In terms of Tuesday’s figures, analysts are expecting Ted Baker to post pre-tax profit of around £24 million. That’d be a 12% increase on H1 2016’s results – not bad for a period that is traditionally weaker than the second half of the year.
Ted Baker PLC has a consensus rating of ‘Buy’ alongside an average target price of £29.61.
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