Once again, a lot of Australian non food retailers are publishing decent results. Interesting to see that there is often some narrative against this sector : arrival of Amazon in Australia several years ago or poor consumption more recently.
These negative narratives do not prevent a lot of these groups to publish quite good results. They do not necessarily show strong top line growth, but often high level of margin (cf table above published by @gragou02, where we could also add Universal Stores which has also a high margin) and high level of cash flow/free cash flow. Of course, it would be more interesting to identify the reasons for these good results (on a regular basis) by a lot of listed retailers. One reason is probably that a lot of these groups focus on their existing stores and have a good cost control, rather than focusing on expanding their number of stores. They may also have benefited in the short term from the problems of a lot of independent stores.
Because of the regular concerns the stock market has about these companies, most of these stocks do not look really expensive. Only weakness I can see is that, except Lovisa, all these companies remain very domestic, which is limiting their medium term growth.
