Asos retail sales up 32 percent

Asos, the online fashion store has announced that its total retail sales grew 32 percent to 231.2 million

pounds (371 million dollars) compared to 174.8 million pounds (280 million dollars) in 2011 in its review of five months ended August 31, 2012. According to the company, the key driver of retail sales growth continues to be its international business (up 46 percent), although UK growth was also encouraging in the period (up 13 percent). The international portion of its retail sales mix has continued to increase during the period and accounted for 65 percent of total retail sales.

Commenting on the results, Nick Robertson, CEO, said, “Following our change of year end I am pleased to report another strong performance for Asos for the five months ended 31 August 2012, with retail sales up 32 percent to 231 million pounds and profit before tax and exceptional items up 42 percent to 13.2 million pounds (21.1 million dollars).”

He further added saying, “During the period we improved our product offer in terms of range, quality and price, invested in our customer proposition, made progress in developing the Asos platform and continued to drive efficiencies from the business to fuel our future growth. We remain confident in our outlook for 2012/13 with our international operations continuing to drive growth, whilst the UK business performance is encouraging. Our 1:5:5 ambitions of achieving 1 billion pounds (1.6 billion dollars) sales from five major markets by 2015 are in sight.”

The sale of third party brands remains very important to Asos and over the past five months, it has added new womenswear brands including Little Mistress, Lazy Oaf, Adidas and in menswear Esprit, Benetton and Adidas. Menswear continued to grow particularly strongly during the period accounting for 24 percent of total sales and as a result is helping to diversify the Group’s revenue streams. Womenswear remains a more competitive market, which demands that Asos is at the top of its game from a fashion, buying and merchandising and marketing perspective.

Asos is a global online fashion and beauty retailer offering over 60,000 branded and own label product lines across womenswear, menswear, footwear, accessories, jewellery and beauty with approximately 1,500 new product lines being introduced each week.