29/07/2020 : The Headlines:
This morning we announced our Q1 Trading Update:
• Q1 Group sales up +22.5%, Q1 Branded sales up +27.0%
• Q1 UK sales up +23.0%, Q1 Branded UK sales up +27.9%
• Outperforming the market in every category
• Online growth of +115%; ahead of the channel and gaining +2.7ppts share
• Strong household penetration growth, particularly for Grocery brands
• Advertising investment increasing from four to six major brands this year
• Recently upgraded expectations for the full year unchanged; initial Q2 volumes remain elevated
Alex Whitehouse, Chief Executive Officer
“As expected, we continued to see strong demand for our Grocery brands in Q1, with consumers eating the vast majority of their meals at home. We have grown faster than our categories during this period, both in standard retail and online channels. This reflects not only the strength of our market leading brands but also the excellent performance of our colleagues across the supply chain to ensure product availability while working in close collaboration with our customers to meet this elevated demand.”
“The health and wellbeing of all our colleagues has been, and remains, of paramount importance to us. The additional measures we put in place to safeguard our teams from early March are unchanged and our manufacturing and distribution sites have all remained fully operational.”
“We continue to deploy our branded growth model strategy; our innovation has performed particularly well in Q1 and the first of our six brands on air this year benefitted from an extended period of TV advertising in the quarter. We have also observed significant increases in household penetration of our brands in the quarter, as Britain has got cooking again and consumers expand their repertoire of dishes prepared at home. For example, we have seen two million new households buy our Sharwood’s products over the quarter.”
“We repaid £80m of our floating rate bonds in the quarter which will reduce our annual interest bill by at least £4m and we are exploring further opportunities to reduce our financing costs as we continue to reduce Net debt. As anticipated, early Q2 trading has seen further positive volume trends and our recently upgraded expectations for the full year remain unchanged.”
To read and download the full RNS in PDF format, please click here.