'Gerry Weber has clearly grown ahead of industry averages' – CEO

14 Mar '09

6 min read

We then asked him how different is men's fashion from that of women, to which he replied by saying, ”Both are very different. We are producing women's apparel's only and this is our expertise. Gerry Weber is building a new in-house design team for their brand 'Gerry Weber Men'. The target is to optimise the collection and to create a strong concept which corresponds with the market needs, especially the casual part of the collection, which will benefit from the know how of Halle Westfalen”.

We further prodded him by asking him his future plans for expansion of the retail network, to which he said, “In particular, the company plans to push ahead its retail business. Our equity ratio of 60.9 percent means that we are excellently positioned to cope with the challenging funding conditions in today's current capital market. Our comfortable liquidity situation allows our planned investments to go ahead despite the bleaker outlook for the economy as a whole”.

Gerhard Weber continued by explaining, “The company plans to open approximately 100 additional stores of Gerry Weber in the current year and in each of the coming three years, of which about 50 percent will be company owned. At the same time, the Gerry Weber Group will continue to expand its wholesale business in close partnership with retailers. This will involve the opening of some 200 new shop-in-shops during the current financial year”.

In our concluding question we asked Mr Gerhard to gaze through a crystal globe and asked him to foresee the future of retail industry, considering the economic downturn, to which he replied positively by saying, “The Gerry Weber Group is convinced that it will continue to grow in the current financial year despite the challenging economic conditions and our company's excellent development is mainly due to our increasing responsibility at the point of sale”.

He continued in the same vein by saying, “While remaining a strong partner to retailers, the Gerry Weber Group continues to position itself as a vertically integrated system supplier, managing the entire value chain from product development to sales in our own stores and our flexible distribution concept has allowed us to capitalise on all opportunities presenting themselves in the market, as a result we have grown clearly ahead of the industry average for several years”.

Divulging key financial data he said, “The Company's own retail activities were once again the fastest growing segment in the last financial year. The retail segment, which aggregates the revenues of the 108 company-managed outlets in Germany and abroad, increased its sales by 26.8 percent from EUR 88.7 million to EUR 112.5 million. This growth mainly reflects the opening of 42 additional stores of Gerry Weber”.

“Like-for-like store sales grew by an average of 2.0 percent compared to the previous year, meaning that the Gerry Weber Group outperformed the industry average also in terms of organic growth. The share of the retail sales in group sales also rose by 2.2 percent to 19.7 percent. As on October 31, 2008, there were a total of 287 exclusive outlets of Gerry Weber, including 179 franchised outlets whose sales are not counted towards the retail business”.

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