Fashion retailer New Look clocks 2% dip in FY'11 sales

Our international franchise business continued to perform strongly, beating its budget, increasing store numbers by 54% and entering four new major market clusters with new partners in Indonesia, the Balkans, North Africa and South East Europe.

Outlook

Looking ahead we will continue the work already started to improve ranging, pricing and quality, to build our online offer and to adapt our store portfolio to the changing environment.

The start of the financial year has seen a continuation of the encouraging trends from the second half, albeit that we, like others on the high street, have been impacted by the abnormally wet and cold spring weather. While we expect the economic backdrop to remain challenging, we are confident that New Look will continue to make progress through the year

Alistair McGeorge, Executive Chairman, said:

“New Look is making good progress in its turnaround, delivering on our plan, in what remains a challenging consumer environment. The evidence for this can clearly be seen in our performance in the second half compared to the first.

When I joined the business a year ago we were facing significant internal disruption, we had lost our edge in terms of our value position and alienated some customers with our ranging. All this meant we had undermined our competitiveness on the high street.

“We have made significant progress in addressing these issues – work that will continue through this year. We are completely focussed on delivering a better customer experience, whether it be in store or online. We are also continuing our work to ensure we have a strong brand and a distinctive proposition that generates improved customer loyalty.

“Our long-term goal is sustainable growth and we have taken steps to address some of the issues with our capital structure. Clearly there is much that remains to be done, but we are confident that we now have the right strategy in place and are doing what is necessary to continue to make progress through this year and beyond. Our mission is to deliver exciting, authoritative, appealing fashion, at the right price every time, and across whichever channel is most convenient to our customers. This is the key to our future success.”

New Look