Fashion etailer Boohoo has seen revenue across the group fall by 17%, with UK revenue dropping to £921mn and US revenues falling by 18%.
In its latest results for the 12 months ending 29 February 2024, the retailer stressed that “high levels of inflation and weakened consumer demand” were behind these declines.
Boohoo has therefore adjusted its EBITDA to the bottom end of its guidance at £58.6mn, below the 2022/23 figure of £63.3mn.
However, the gross margin improved to 51.8% while the adjusted EBITDA margin improved 40bps to 4.0%. This reflects the group’s cost saving programmes which have seen it focus on more profitable sales, with improvements in managing distribution and other logistics costs, as well as inventory management.
John Lyttle, Boohoo Group CEO, said: “We continue to take actions to deliver on our goal of bringing the entire group back to profitable growth. In FY24, we completed our investment cycle with the launch of our US distribution centre and the successful delivery of our Sheffield Automation project. Sheffield is already delivering significant efficiency improvements, which, together with the traction of Debenhams marketplace, is generating margin improvement across the group.”
Boohoo also credited its Debenhams marketplace for driving high margin growth and expanding customer proposition.
“We have also taken steps to transition several of our labels over onto Debenhams marketplace to drive enhanced profitability. This proved effective during the year and is something that will drive additional profitability going forward. These factors, combined with improving market conditions, give us strong confidence in our medium-term outlook,” noted Lyttle.
Additionally, its own brands – boohoo, boohooMAN, PLT and Karen Millen, as well as Debenhams – will be a focus going forward in a bid to generate demand across a “diverse, global customer base”.
Lyttle stated: “We have a highly loyal customer base and throughout the year we remained focused on maintaining our position as an industry leading, fashion-forward group with brands that deliver on-trend, high quality fashion at great value prices. The strength and diversity across our core brands means the Group is well placed to serve a global customer base across fashion, beauty and home.”
BoohooMAN entered the Top50 of the recently published RetailX UK Top500.
It joins 33 retailers that appear in the Top500 list this year but did not in 2023. These are mostly companies that have been on our radar for years and that this year had footprint indicators (web traffic, revenue, stores) that earned them a place in the Top500.
See the full 500 list by downloading the 10th edition of the report.
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