Mulberry is still small in Asia – the luxury sector’s gold rush town
IT is rare for a company to perform quite so spectacularly on almost every count. Group revenue was up almost 70 per cent; pre-tax profit was up an unbelievable 358 per cent; the gross margin jumped 640 basis points to 65.4 per cent. Its cash pile is almost twice the size at £21.4m. We could go on.
The current year is also going swimmingly. In the ten weeks to June, retail sales had already jumped 38 per cent with like-for-like revenues up 42 per cent.
Perhaps most exciting is the firm’s growth prospects. Asian sales of £14.8m account for just 12 per cent of overall revenues; compare that to Prada, which gets around a fifth of sales from Macau, Hong Kong and China alone, and you can see that Mulberry has a lot of room to grow in the luxury sector’s equivalent of a gold rush town.
Its decision to appoint Melissa Ong, a veteran of the Asia luxury sector, as a non-executive director shows that it is serious about making a go of it.
Yesterday, the shares closed at 1,450p, 10 per cent below their peak at the end of April. We think 2,000p is in sight.