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Mothercare - Warns on profits

February 2014

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.

  • Epic Code:
  • MTC
  • Price:
  • 272p
Mothercare has warned that full year profit expectations will be below forecast. Analysts blamed deep and heavy discounting and poor sales in the toy market in the run up to Christmas for the weak UK performance in which like-for-like sales fell 4% (versus -2.3% the previous year) in the 12 weeks to 4 January 2014 while margins also fell. Internationally, Mothercare slowed down from previously high levels of growth with underlying sales up just 3.3% (versus 9.2% a year ago). It wasn't helped by unseasonal weather affecting some of its largest markets including Russia (warm autumn) and the Middle East. Pretax profit forecasts from Numis have been reduced from £17m to £8m for FY14 and from £33m to £15m for FY15. Eps forec ...

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