Goldman downgrades Burberry to 'neutral' after outperformance

Goldman Sachs downgraded its stance on luxury fashion brand Burberry to ‘neutral’ from ‘buy’ and took the stock off its ‘Conviction List’ following recent outperformance.

The bank, which left its price target unchanged at 2,536p, noted that Burberry has outperformed luxury peers by 21 percentage points over the past six months and given the recent weakness across the sector, it now sees more attractive relative upside elsewhere.

It pointed out that Burberry shares have risen by around 27% since being added to the buy and Conviction lists on 27 March, versus the FTSE World Europe up around 4%.

"We continue to see a strong equity story emerging for Burberry and our 2020 adjusted EBIT estimate remains 16% ahead of Bloomberg consensus but Burberry’s 28% re-rating year-to-date suggests investor expectations have risen," Goldman said. "Burberry trades on a 2019E calendar price-to-earnings of 22.3x (versus peers at 20.7x)."

GS said it forecasts 4% like-for-like growth in the second half of 2019 compared to 3% in the first quarter.

"With new initiatives underway, this could prove to be conservative. In the event Burberry delivers a sharper acceleration in LFL sooner than we expect, it would leave upside risks to estimates; all else being equal, we forecast that a 1% change in retail sales would drive a 2% increase in EBIT."

At 1010 BST, the shares were down 0.8% to 2,078p.