Fishing Republic reels in profit guidance for full year

Fishing Republic's landed a healthy set of interim results to June but endured a quieter July and August and said its profit for the full year would be lower as it invested in expanding its store network.

The fishing tackle retailer, where ex-Tesco chief Sir Terry Leahy is a non-executive director, in June raised a gross £3.75m in order to "accelerate investment" across the estate and online, leaving £3.9m on the balance sheet at the end of June.

But with sales during the latter part of the summer season lower than expected, combined with two further store openings in Cambridge and Reading before year end, and the increased investment plans implies that costs will increase, with management saying they had "rebased our profit forecasts for the current financial year" accordingly.

"We fully expect the benefits of this investment programme to begin to flow through in 2017 and beyond," they added.

For the first six months of the year, group sales were up 34% to £2.5m and up 16% on a like-for-like basis.

Store sales were up 23% on a LFL basis, including the newly relocated Hull store, and including the new stores in Birmingham, Crewe and Swindon store sales jumped an impressive 70%.

Sales from the company's website increased 153% and now represent almost a third of total online sales, but total online sales fell 9% due to lower sales from third party websites such as eBay and Amazon, a reflection of shifting the focus on growing sales derived from own websites, where a greater margin can be captured for the business.

Adjusted pre-tax profit was up 5% to £0.16m reflecting increased costs of being a publicly quoted business and additional resources for new stores.

Shares in Fishing Republic splashed down to 32p in early trading but flapped back to 39.8p by late afternoon, which was less than a 2% fall on the day.