Half of specialty retailers have now reported their earnings, as well as one shopping center operator (Vicinity). Overall, the market has well reacted to most of these results (main exception, Super Retail) as there was no major disappointment with these results.
Usually, these groups had : . a slight increase of their comp sales, . gross margin which were more or less flat, . and cost of doing business increasing more than gross profit.
The best performances came from Baby Bunting and The Reject Shop which increased their comp sales, gross margin and EBIT margin. Once again, Universal had also a good performance with a double digit increase for comp sales and an increase of its gross margin.
The main positive elements for these retailers was that Q2 sales were good, usually with no decrease of gross margin. Vicinity indicated, in particular, "a strong Nov/Dec trading period" with sales for the shops in their malls increased by 3.2 % during that period (only + 0.6 % for supermarkets, so discretionary retailers increased more than 3 %).
The groups which published gave a trading update for H2 25 which shows that this good sales trend continues so far.
