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Marks & Spencer - To close 53 international stores

January 2017

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:
  • MKS
  • Price:
  • 339p
After a tough first quarter Marks & Spencer released half year results slightly ahead of expectations but underlying pretax profit still fell 19% to £231m on sales up 1% to almost £5bn. Eps fell 18% to 11.5p while net debt rose 2% to £2.24bn.Clothing & Home was the culprit with like-for-like sales down 5.9%, but the most disappointing aspect was gross margin only rising 0.1%, below original expectations of +0.5-1.0%, mainly reflecting weaker sterling. Food sales rose 4% in total but are down 0.9% like-for-like.These figures were overshadowed by new CEO Steve Rowe’s strategy update, in which he now intends to exit 10 international markets, which will involve closing 53 stores. Last year internat ...

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