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Marks & Spencer - Tight stock control maintains margins

February 2010

Investing in shares may lose you all or some of your money. Past performance is no indication of future performance. Some of the shares recommended here may be small company shares, which can be relatively illiquid and hard to trade and this makes such shares more risky than other investments.

Marks & Spencer revealed a solid trading update for the third quarter to 26 December, with group sales up 2.6%, while after adjusting for the timing of the sale, total UK like-for-like sales rose nearly 2%. A key positive is that in general merchandise, it maintained full prices as planned and still achieved sales growth of 3.2%, while better stock control meant there was less stock going into the sale than last year, so that guidance for gross margin remains unchanged. In food, investment in innovation and a range of deals for customers helped like-for-like sales turn positive again. Consensus forecasts remain unchanged with pretax profit of £628m and eps of 28.5p expected. The shares, which were added to ...

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