2018 was a holiday from hell for the beleaguered stock. The first 4 and a half months actually weren’t too bad, Thomas Cook (LON:TCG) hitting a near 3 year high of £1.49 in mid-May. After that point, however, it crumbled, eventually collapsing to less than 20p per share at the start of December.
Having closed out 2018 at 30.79p, it hasn’t done too much since 2019 began, flirting with 40p a couple of times before pulling back to a current trading price of 34.65p.
The company’s last update was at the end of November, when Thomas Cook was forced to post a statement 2 days before its scheduled full year release to get ahead of some bad news. On November 27th it revealed that underlying profit from operations was £250 million, £58 million lower than the prior year on a like-for-like basis and £30 million worse off than it had predicted just 2 months before.
This was then confirmed on the 29th November, alongside news that the company had swing to a pre-tax loss of £53 million against FY17’s £43 million profit as the cost of slashing prices to lure in customers over that sweltering European summer hit hard.
By the sounds of it, anyone hoping for a New Year reset with Thursday’s first quarter results may be disappointed. A survey from Morgan Stanley (NYSE:MS) showed that Thomas Cook (and rival TUI) are losing market share to sector upstarts, with analysts expecting a wider Q1 loss of £52 million due to ‘a slow start to winter trading’.
Thomas Cook Group PLC(LON:TCG) has a consensus rating of ‘Hold’ alongside an average target price of 87.56p.
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