Good morning: Mike Ashley’s retail business Frasers Group has warned that it expects to write down the value of its shops and other property by more than £200 million because of the Covid-19 crisis.
Frasers, which owns Sports Direct and House of Fraser, has said this morning that it thinks further Covid-19 restrictions are “almost certain” and therefore it is increasing its expected writedown from the £100 million it warned of in February.
Most Frasers shops around the country have been closed this year due to Covid-19 restrictions, with consumers focusing their spending online instead, a trend that is unlikely to be totally reversed when lockdown ends. Of Frasers brands, only Evans Cycles was classed as an essential retailer and allowed to continue trading.
Non-essential retailers are due to be allowed to open their doors again from Monday. However, Frasers said in its statement: “In our ongoing assessment we note the continuing government and government adviser pronouncements regarding ‘third waves’ and normality being ‘some way off’, meaning further restrictions are in our view almost certain.”
In other corporate news this morning, Boohoo, the online retailer, has agreed to lease a new warehouse in Daventry that it says will secure up to 500 jobs and create 1,000 more in the future. Boohoo said the warehouse will boost the company’s capacity to annual sales of more than £4 billion and work alongside other facilities in Burnley, Sheffield and Wellingborough.
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The global recruitment business PageGroup has said that profits rose 31 per cent year-on-year in March as the outlook for the job market improves. The company reported that for the first quarter of 2021 as a whole, group gross profit rose 2 per cent to £184 million and that it now expects annual operating profits to be between £90 million and £100 million, compared with £17 million in 2020.
There are also updates from Avon Rubber, the Co-operative Bank and Loungers this morning.
Today get the latest house price update from Halifax. Its survey showed that house prices fell 0.1 per cent in February compared with January but rose 5.2 per cent year-on-year. The IMF and World Bank spring meetings also continue today and the latest producer price index is published in the US.
Please do keep sending your thoughts, observations (and corrections) to me at graham.ruddick@thetimes.co.uk and don’t forget to follow me on Twitter @grahamtruddick.
Have a great weekend and Richard will be back in your inbox on Monday morning.
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Graham
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