Gerry Weber's H1 net sales decline by 23.4 percent

In the first six months of 2021, Gerry Weber International’s total net sales amounted to 107.7 million euros compared to 140.5 million euros in H1 2020, approximately 23.4 percent below the level of the prior year period. The company’s online net sales increased by 37.8 percent to 20.8 million euros during the period.

“While the first quarter was made difficult by the pandemic, our stores gradually reopened in full in the course of the second quarter. The revenue trend in June was very positive and shows that our strategic initiatives are being accepted by the market,” said Florian Frank, chief financial officer of Gerry Weber International AG.

Review of Gerry Weber’s first half performance

The company said, net sales of the retail segment including e-commerce share declined sharply to 60.9 million euros compared to 74.5 million euros in the previous year due to the lockdown. With its wholesale partners including e-commerce share, the Gerry Weber Group generated net sales of 46.8 million euros compared to 66 million euros last year.

The company added that gross profit deteriorated by 18 percent in the first six months and amounted to 67.3 million euros, while gross profit margin improved by 4.4 percentage points to 62.5 percent.

EBITDA increased to 5.3 million euros compared to negative 1.1 million euros in the previous year and at 4.9 percent, the EBITDA margin exceeded the prior year’s negative 0.7 percent. Normalised EBITDA also improved to negative 10.2 million euros against previous year’s figure of negative 22.9 million euros and the normalised EBITDA margin reached negative 9.5 percent compared to negative 16.3 percent. Accordingly, the result for the period stood at negative 24.2 million euros compared to negative 34.2 million euros.

Even though all stores have been open again since June 2021, the company expects opening rules to be tightened again if incidence rates pick up, which is generally expected to happen in autumn/winter. For the fiscal year 2021, the company’s managing board continues to project consolidated net sales of between 260 million euros and 280 million euros and intends to further improve the company’s profitability. Normalised consolidated EBITDA is expected to be improved to a negative low double-digit million figure.