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UK high street kidswear and nursery brand Mamas & Papas is recovering from the pandemic and said sales to the end of March were up 36% year-on-year, “buoyed by more openings, new product launches and its enhanced online presence”.
Over a third of the group sales by volume come from overseas operations, which include 20 franchisee stores across the Middle East and a network of distributors and agents in 40 countries.
The company also gave more details about its plans to step up the expansion of its UK store network over the next 12 months.
It aims to more than double the number of concessions through its strategic partnership with Next, adding another 19 to the 14 it already operates with the retail giant, creating up to 200 jobs.
These will be in addition to the 22 standalone stores it also operates.
It’s part of its “post-pandemic bricks and mortar expansion drive”, which could also include additional concessions with other retailers that are “keen to provide customers with a best-in-class nursery offer”. No further details were available on which retailers it’s talking to.
COO Nathan Williams said: “The pandemic showed us just how much our customers missed visiting our stores. There’s simply no substitute for the quality and depth of experience you can create with bricks and mortar.
“That’s why we’re currently investing so significantly in opening new space across the UK and accelerating the growth of our store estate further this year with new and existing concession partners.”
Watches of Switzerland has continued its undeniably impressive performance and on Wednesday said that it saw a "stellar end" to FY22 with strong momentum going into the new financial year.
The fast-growing luxury watches and jewellery group released a trading update for Q4 and the full year with details of its performance up to 1 May, and it showed how buoyant the luxury watches and jewellery market remains.
Revenue growth of 40% for the full year came with improved profitability and in the final quarter, revenue was up as much as 48%.
As well as its eponymous chains, the group also owns Mappin & Webb and Goldsmiths in the UK, Mayors and Betteridge in the US and operates a number of monobrand boutiques.
CEO Brian Duffy called it “an outstanding year for the group” and said it delivered “another record year of revenue and profitability as we continue to progress our Long Range Plan”.
The performance was also “outstanding” in both the US and UK, “supported by broad-based sales growth across our portfolio of world leading partner brands and driven by domestic clientele”.
And he's upbeat about the potential offered by the company's recent debut in the European market.
He said that overall, the luxury watch and jewellery markets “are dynamic and our group investment-led model continues to gain positive momentum”.
Consumer desire for ‘Super High Demand’ brands like Rolex, Patek Philippe and Audemars Piguet “continues to exceed supply and other luxury watch brands are enjoying exceptionally strong demand and sales. Luxury jewellery demand is also very positive”, we’re told.
So what exactly happened in Q4? Group revenue rose to £304 million from £218 million a year earlier, with US revenue up 50% to £136 million. It opened a flagship Watches of Switzerland branch in Kenwood Towne Center, Cincinnati, Ohio during the period.
UK revenue rose 47% to £168 million and it opened three monobrand boutiques in key locations — Breitling Bullring, TAG Solihull and Omega Meadowhall.
For the year, group revenue rose 40%, as mentioned, to £1.238 billion with US revenue up 48% to £428 million and UK revenue up 36% to £810 million.
FY22 luxury watch sales rose 36% on the year and luxury jewellery sales were up a massive 86%, “reflecting a strong market, continued improvement in ranging, incremental growth from the Betteridge acquisition and the opening of our first Bulgari monobrand boutique”.
Importantly too, group e-commerce sales for FY22 were up 5% on last year, even though the prior year had seen an e-tail boost due to stores being closed. And they were up 128% vs FY20.
The company said sales continued to be driven by a domestic clientele, making up 97% of group revenue.
It now expects FY22 adjusted pre-IFRS 16 EBITDA of between £160 million and £164 million, up from £105 million in FY21.
And it said it enters FY23 “with strong momentum and anticipates that disruption from the pandemic is now largely behind us with ongoing recovery in footfall and airport traffic”.
Based on current visibility of supply of key brands and confirmed showroom refurbishments, openings and closures, it expects FY23 revenue between £1.45 billion and £1.5 billion. Adjusted EBITDA on a percentage basis should be between flat and 0.5% higher. And profit on an EBIT basis should be between £157 million and £169 million.
The billionaire co-founder and CEO of fintech giant Revolut, Nikolay Storonsky, is launching a new venture fund called the Quantum Light Capital Fund.
Storonsky, along with several other investors, will be putting in around $200m (£161m) into the new fund, which has been described as powered by artificial intelligence (AI).
With a total amount raised of $1.8bn (£1.45bn), Storonsky’s Revolut has become one of Europe’s most valuable startups, hitting a valuation of $33bn in July of last year.
The Revolut boss is now looking to bring his knowledge of the tech startup ecosystem to investing. The Russian-born CEO said he was inspired by what he felt were the flaws in the traditional venture capital system.
“Based on my experience as an entrepreneur for the last eight years I found VCs’ product pretty frustrating,” Storonsky said.
“In the bad times no one wants to invest, in the good times they all want to invest — so the lessons were that VCs are pretty unstable and there is some element of crowd mentality.”
The Quantum Light Fund will use an AI-powered system, which has been designed by a team of data scientists and engineers, to scour corporate databases and LinkedIn to identify startups with promising growth without relying on “having human judgement”.
“Different people have different opinions, and this is how you end up with this crowd mentality,” said Storonsky.
This method was inspired by a handful of funds that track databases as a way to find new investment opportunities, although Storonsky believes there is a key difference.
“I interviewed a lot of people from a lot of funds, and they just use data sources to identify breakouts, but this has nothing to do with machine learning.”
The Revolut CEO has previously acted as an angel investor for the Swedish fintech startup Tink, which was later acquired by Visa for $2.1bn.
The half Ukrainian, Russian-born executive earlier this year spoke out to denounce Russia’s invasion of Ukraine.
London-based fintech Thought Machine has doubled its valuation to $2.7bn (£2.2bn) after a $160m funding round featuring institutional investor Morgan Stanley.
The Series D round was led by Singaporean investor Temasek, with Italian bank Intesa Sanpaolo and Morgan Stanley participating. Lloyds TSB Group also provided capital.
Founded in 2014, Thought Machine is a cloud-based banking infrastructure specialist that allows banks across the world to scale up servers and processing power.
The company boasts a client list made up of some of the biggest names in international banking, including JP Morgan, Lloyds Banking Group, Standard Chartered and neobank Atom.
Thought Machine intends to use the new funding to expand into new markets in Asia, specifically Vietnam, Thailand and Indonesia.
“We intend to become the leader in core banking technology, and are being deployed by the biggest, most successful banks around the world,” said Paul Taylor, founder of Thought Machine.
“We will use this new capital to accelerate our expansion plans, serve more clients around the world, and continuously refine the capabilities of our core banking platform and other products.”
Thought Machine operates in the cloud computing space, and while it is aware of the market dominance that Big Tech firms like Amazon have in the cloud, Taylor feels confident there is space for what his company does.
“You have to focus on what is key — Google has done really well on enterprise, but it can’t do everything,” Taylor said in an interview with The Financial Times.
“There are things like payments, fraud, anti-money laundering, tonnes of stuff.”
Investors Intesa Sanpaolo expressed confidence in Thought Machine’s ability to grow rapidly.
“Thought Machine’s cloud-based technology is fundamental to our transformation from incumbent to digital challenger, improving our core banking technology and providing the foundation for our new digital bank, Isybank,” said Carlo Messina, managing director and CEO.
Now sitting at a valuation of $2.7bn, Thought Machine hit the unicorn value of $1bn for the first time after a $200m Series C funding round back in November 2021.
British inflation surged last month to its highest annual rate since 1982, piling pressure on finance minister Rishi Sunak to step up his help for households facing a worsening cost-of-living crisis.
There are also widespread fears that this will dent spending on discretionary items as consumers prioritise necessities, and the fashion and beauty sectors' post-pandemic recoveries could come to a grinding halt.
Consumer price inflation hit 9% in April, the Office for National Statistics said on Wednesday, surpassing the peaks of the early 1990s recession that many Britons remember for sky-high interest rates and widespread mortgage defaults.
The Reuters' poll of economists had pointed to a reading of 9.1%.
Britain now has the highest inflation rate of Europe's five biggest economies and almost certainly the Group of Seven countries, with Canada and Japan yet to report figures for April. Neither are likely to match Britain's price growth.
"We cannot protect people completely from these global challenges but are providing significant support where we can, and stand ready to take further action," Sunak said.
Sterling fell after the data and was down 0.6% against the dollar at 0816 GMT.
Soaring energy bills were the biggest inflation driver, reflecting last month's increase in regulated energy tariffs. Knock-on effects from Russia's invasion of Ukraine means those bills are likely to jump higher again in October.
Households are facing the biggest cost-of-living squeeze since records began in the 1950s, according to Britain's budget forecasters, and consumer confidence has sunk towards all-time lows.
Anti-poverty campaigners called on Sunak to act now, starting with an immediate increase in the value of welfare benefits to match inflation.
"As the price of essentials like food and energy continue to soar, the Chancellor's (finance minister's) inaction will make an already desperate situation for many even worse," Rebecca McDonald, senior economist at the Joseph Rowntree Foundation which campaigns on behalf of lower-income households, said.
A survey published on Tuesday showed two in three people in Britain had kept their heating off when they would normally have turned it on, almost half were driving less or changing supermarkets and just over a quarter say they have skipped meals.
Food prices rose by nearly 7% in the 12 months to April, the ONS said.
On Monday, Bank of England Governor Andrew Bailey, speaking to lawmakers, said food price rises were a major worry as he apologised for "being apocalyptic for a moment."
While the government has said it now has a£ 22 billion ($27.4 billion) package of support for households, much of this is cancelled out by the effect of recent tax increases on workers.
An increase in prices charged by restaurants and cafes, as value-added tax rates went back to their pre-pandemic levels in April, also added to the inflation jump last month.
The BoE this month forecast inflation would top 10% later this year and investors expect it will add to the four interest rate increases it has implemented since December and which have taken its Bank Rate to 1%, its highest since 2009.
"Things are going to get worse before they get better," said Paul Dales, chief UK economist at Capital Economics consultancy of Wednesday's data.
Retail price inflation -- an older measure which the ONS says is now inaccurate, but which is widely used in commercial contracts and to set interest payments on inflation-linked government bonds -- jumped to 11.1% last month, also the highest since 1982.
There were signs of further inflation pressure ahead as manufacturers suffered the joint biggest increase on record in the prices they pay for their raw materials, which were up by an annual 18.6%, matching March's high.
Factories increased their prices by 14% over the 12 months to April, the biggest jump since July 2008.
London-based venture capital (VC) firms have come out on top for their ability to spot and invest in technology unicorns at an early stage across Europe, the Middle East and Africa.
In an industry often dominated by the US, London-headquartered VC firm LocalGlobe has been identified as the VC backing the most startups at the seed or Series A stage that went on to achieve valuations of $1bn or more.
That’s according to data compiled by startup intelligence company Dealroom, which said using this metric instead of total investment size can make it possible to compare firms on a “level playing field”.
LocalGlobe, which has invested in the likes of fintech giant Wise and insurtech Zego, came out on top at the seed stage, as well as for seed and Series A combined.
Meanwhile, London-based Seedcamp was identified as the second-best at spotting unicorns at the seed stage of investment.
London-based Balderton Capital also featured on the top unicorn hunter list.
US-based VCs Accel and Index Ventures were the first and second most successful at backing future unicorns at the Series A stage.
The data is based on last year’s record levels of VC investment. The firms in Dealroom’s top 10 unicorn investors made a combined 406 investments at the early stage last year.
In 2021, VCs invested $138.6bn in tech companies across EMEA – more than double the amount in 2020.
Separate research has previously shown that last year London tech startups raised a record $25.5bn (£18.55bn), making it the fourth-highest city for VC investment globally.
Italy's Zegna is aiming for revenue above 2 billion euros ($2.1 billion) in the medium term, up from the 1.29 billion euros posted last year, the fashion group said on Tuesday at its first Capital Markets Day since its debut on Wall Street in late 2021.
The family-owned group is targeting an adjusted operating profit margin of at least 15% in the mid-term from a level of around 10% achieved in 2021.
The group, which controls Italy's luxury menswear brand Zegna and U.S. label Thom Browne, expects a rise in store productivity to drive the growth in revenues, that should "more than offset" the increasing marketing investments planned to support the brands' expansion.
Keeping its focus on sustainability, a long-standing commitment for the group, Zegna unveiled its ESG (Environmental, Social and Governance) strategy that will be overseen by the group's board and tied to executive bonuses.
The group, based in the northern Italian region of Piedmont, has been a forerunner with regards to environmental protection, with policies including the creation of natural oasis close to its headquarters and the use of recycled materials in its collections.
Among its goals it plans to only use renewable sources of electricity in Europe and the U.S. by 2024, and for all of the group's operations by 2027.
By 2026, it expects over half of its main raw materials to be fully traceable, and for this to rise to exceed 95% by 2030.
Starting from next year, Zegna will also plant 10,000 trees in every city where it's going to open or relocate its shops, in a plan to reconnect to its reforestation project, started off by its founder in the early 1900s.
Zegna made its debut on the New York stock exchange in December after a merger with Investindustrial Acquisition Corp, a special-purpose acquisition company (SPAC) sponsored by Italian private equity firm Investindustrial and chaired by former UBS chief executive Sergio Ermotti.
Men’s fashion website Mr Porter has launched Tee Store x Mr Porter Health In Mind, to “drive awareness for men’s mental health and wellbeing”, the Yoox Net-A-Porter-owned luxury e-tail brand said.
The capsule collection is made up of 104 exclusive pieces created and produced by 18 leading contemporary and designer brands, who were tasked with creating pieces to reflect the project’s brief.
Available globally, the collection takes in graphic T-shirts, hoodies, hats and socks in a palette of “joyful colours and streetwear silhouettes” from brands including Acne Studios, Gallery Dept, Museum of Peace & Quiet, Polite Worldwide, and Sorry In Advance. New brands to Mr Porter also include Emotionally Unavailable, Fortnite Premium, and Stockholm Surfboard Club.
Net profits of each piece sold during the first two weeks are being donated to ‘Mr Porter Health In Mind Fund’, powered by charity Movember, “supporting men’s mental and physical health initiatives to help men lead happier, healthier and more fulfilling lives”.
The collection and initiative is powered by “Mr Porter’s values of community, inclusivity and discoverability, providing its global customer base with exclusive product from both established and new, up-and-coming brands”, it said.
Themes including happiness, friendship and pastimes pertinent to the collection, “showcased through inspirational graphics, novelty designs, slogans and archival prints”.
The capsule’s launch is also being supported by a community-focused campaign, “promoting a positive message and awareness of men’s mental health, capturing organic day-to-day exchanges of self-expression and conversations between men”, brought to life across Mr Porter’s social and editorial platforms.
“Following the success of the past Tee Store collections, the brands this year have created something truly special, giving our customers the ability to discover and own exclusive pieces from the world’s top contemporary brands, while expressing mental health through their designs,” said Daniel Todd, senior buyer for Mr Porter.
JD Sports has revealed sales were up 5% in the current financial year to date, a performance it said was "a positive reflection of both the strength and breadth of the group's brand relationships and category offer".
The positive growth in the first 14 weeks of its year to 7 May was achieved amid a global shortfall in the supply of key footwear styles, the sports and fashion company said.
JD said it expected supply of product to improve as the year progresses and it had maintained forecast that headline profit before tax and exceptional items for the year end 28 January 2023 would at least be equal to that for the year ended 29 January 2022 (£940 million).
However the group said that while it was reassured by its latest trading performance, which was in line with expectations, it was "conscious of the headwinds that prevail at this time including the general global macro-economic and geopolitical situation."
The group has delayed the announcement of its year end results to the end of January 2022 while it unpicks the situation regarding the Competition and Market Authority's decision to force it to sell off Footasylum, which it had acquired in 2019 for £90 million. It said it expected to reveal the result by early June but a firm date would be announced in due course.
Luxury British leather goods brand Mulberry has today launched ‘Lily Zero’, its first carbon neutral bag collection, with 12 styles added to its iconic ‘Lily’ collection, which has become one of the brand’s signature silhouettes.
The collection is carbon neutral all the way from field to shop floor and is in line with Mulberry's commitment to
become Net Zero by 2035, and build on the commitments set out in the brand’s ‘Made to Last’ manifesto which was revealed last year for the brand’s 50th anniversary.
The “soft and supple day-to-evening chain bags” come in a variety of sizes, colours and styles, including the original ‘Lily’ silhouette and ‘Top Handle’, all featuring the brand’s unique “postman’s lock” hardware, and all created in Mulberry’s carbon neutral Somerset factories.
The bags have been crafted using carbon neutral leather from a tannery in Germany, which measures, reduces and offsets its carbon emissions. The carbon neutral leather is also now being used on all of Mulberry’s heavy grain styles, which make up 26% of its AW22 collection.
Mulberry CEO, Thierry Andretta, said: “I’m very proud to launch ‘Lily Zero’, Mulberry’s first carbon neutral range, which represents another step on our sustainability journey, towards increased transparency and our goal of Net Zero by 2035.
“The ‘Lily Zero’ demonstrates what we can achieve together through working closely with our long-term partners. This reinforces Mulberry’s commitment to a sustainable future, outlined in our ambitious Made to Last manifesto published last year during our fiftieth anniversary.”
A ‘Life Cycle Assessment’ has also been undertaken to analyse the full carbon emissions of the range including components, transport, and packaging, all of which have been additionally offset with the World Land Trust, Mulberry’s carbon offsetting partner.
Alongside the new range, the new ‘Lily Zero’ campaign looks to the future, imagined as a futuristic landscape enhanced through an Instagram AR filter. The filter opens a portal which allows the user to fully immerse themselves in a surreal environment, as well as virtually try on the new ‘Lily’.
Exploring the origins of leather’s place in fashion history and its role in a sustainable future, Mulberry launched a ‘Made to Last’ podcast on 5 May 2022, on Spotify and Apple Podcasts, hosted by fashion journalist Susie Lau. Bringing to life areas of the manifesto by the same name, the series takes the listener on a journey over three episodes, speaking to a range of people including television presenter Miquita Oliver, fashion designer Nicholas Daley, fashion historian Judith Watt and Rob Percival, writer and head of food policy at the Soil Association.
Additionally, following Mulberry’s commitment to transparency, the brand is releasing its first sustainability report, sharing its progress from the past year, which will be available to download from the Mulberry website this month.
The report highlights include the increase of leather sourced from environmentally-accredited tanneries to 88%, on track to reach 100% by 2023, and details on the Mulberry Exchange, which has repaired and refurbished over 10,000 products in its Lifetime Service Centre. It has also found new owners for thousands of pre-loved Mulberry bags.
The ‘Lily Zero’ collection is now available in stores globally and from the Mulberry website, with prices starting at £950.