Gear4music tunes up solid growth in 2017 year

The UK’s largest online retailer of musical instruments and equipment, Gear4music, posted a year-end trading update for the 12 months to 28 February on Friday, with UK sales rising 34% to £34.87m year-on-year.

The AIM-traded firm saw a bumper rise in its Europe and rest-of-world sales, however, with the figure rising 124% to £12.26m.

Combined, that made for a 58% increase in total like-for-like sales to £56.13m.

The company said it specifically saw 186% sales growth in Scandinavia between November 2016, when its Swedish distribution centre opened, and February 2017.

It confirmed its German distribution centre was now operational, and said active customer numbers increased by 49% over the year to 339,800.

“We are extremely pleased with our trading performance over the last 12 months, with 58% sales growth being well ahead of our expectations at the start of the year,” said chief executive Andrew Wass.

“As expected, we have achieved especially strong growth in Europe and with our Swedish distribution centre opening in November last year and our German distribution centre commencing operations during the last few weeks, we look forward to building on our success on the continent.”

Wass said the company remained fully focussed on its long-term growth strategy of investing in people, products, websites and operational capabilities, to continually improve the customer proposition, and the board “looked forward” to further progress in the year ahead.

“Whilst continuing to invest in the future growth of the business, we have closely managed our costs and the board is now confident of delivering profits for the year marginally ahead of our increased expectations signalled in January.”

Gear4music said it will report results for the financial year on 9 May.