Updates

Marks & Spencer - Sharp rise in gross margin

February 2016

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 released a mixed update for the Q3 ending December. On the food side sales rose a strong 3.7% (0.4% like-for-like), outperforming a competitive market with 17% growth in the Christmas week.However, this was offset by yet another soggy performance in general merchandise (clothing, homewares) where like-for-like sales fell 5.8%, in part due to the warm December, which caused massive promotional activity by rivals although M&S refused to drop its prices and protected margins. There were two bright spots, however: at M&S.com sales rose 20.9% thanks to strong online traffic while gross margin guidance was upgraded to the top end of the +2%-2.5% range.Operating costs guidance was improved from c +4% to ...

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