Marks & Spencer’s figures for the first half of its financial year were better than expected. Interim pre-tax profit fell by 10% year-on-year to £290m as overall sales remained flat at £4.7bn.
But the sharp 6.8% annual slump in like-for-like general merchandise (clothing and homeware) sales recorded in the spring eased to a 1.8% decline in the three months to late September. Overseas and online sales increased in the first half, which also cheered investors.
What the commentators said
The improvement in the summer quarter suggests that chief executive Marc Bolland “has identified the problems correctly”, said Damian Reece in The Daily Telegraph. They include “supply-chain cock-ups, drab fashion [and] uninspiring merchandise”. The key for M&S is fashion, especially women’s clothing, where Bolland recently appointed new managers to revamp the offering.
It should be fine, said Jonathan Guthrie in the FT. M&S’s “history is circular”. Every few years “the suburban matriarch” who is the group’s core customer “decides its blouses are boring” and thus “dallies with” more fashionable retailers. “National crisis ensues”, but then new clothing bosses “jazz up the blouses” and sales improve.
In short, the brand is strong enough to ensure that the matriarch generally returns to M&S; the group “only needs to be broadly right in its fashion calls”. We now seem to be approaching an “upturn in the boring blouse cycle”.
This time it’s especially important that the womenswear division gets its act together, said James Moore in The Independent. The food business has been defying gravity, but it’s hard to see how that can continue. Food price inflation “is on the march again”, and the worry is that if M&S has to keep raising its already premium prices, at least some of its shoppers may “hold their noses and head elsewhere”.
Bolland has bought himself some time with disgruntled investors, said Nils Pratley in The Guardian. “But Christmas had better be good.”