Ann: Half Yearly Report and Accounts, page-20

""..not often a company posts a 29% fall in profit and EPS, but the share price jumps by 17%!"

Yeah, prima facie that looks curious, but not that strange when the context is considered; namely that the previous corresponding period, from which this result is down 29%, was an absolute monster, 46% higher than its pcp, as can be seen in the graph below (for clarity, December half bars are amplified with darker shading compare to unshaded June half bars):



A better way to view DH2023's performance is to compare it with DH2021 (i.e., ignoring the DH2022 outlier year). In that case the two-year increase is 28%(as indicated by the green arrow).

That, I think, is a truer reflection of the underlying performance of the business.

(Yes, I know that things would not look all that rosy if we went back as far as DH2020 as the base year, but I don't believe that to be a representative period at all, given it reflects the pent-up demand after Covid.)

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