Westfield profit up media and mining earnings down
The first day’s trading in the UK’s biggest retailer has been hampered by a major loss from the media sector, despite an initial positive press release.
The results were delivered on Friday but are expected to be released within days due to holiday trading.
The loss was in the range of £2m to £2.9m, due to the lower than expected share price of WPP – but which is well above what it had been in October when they fell below a flat share price for the first time in their history.
The latest data, released just before Christmas, shows that share prices of the company’s UK outlets have fallen from $0.84 to $0.79 – a 34pc fall.
In the fourth quarter they slumped from a flat to a negative 3.1pc but were in line with expected profits due to higher operating expenses.
Media sales from the country, which make up 17% of WPP’s total sales, have also fallen, from £30.6m in the September quarter to £29.8m in the December슬롯 머신 quarter.
But the retailer is expected to show signs of improvement in 2015 – with a higher share price, less cash burning to generate cash flow from the m예스 카지노edia business and more favourable conditions f안산출장안마 안산출장샵or its digital arm WPP Digital in the second half of the year.
Media profits have been falling for nine quarters and a half but in November, analysts at Macquarie Group said that they could increase in 2016.
The news follows a fall in quarterly financial results for WPP last week for the same reason that many others in the industry have, including the UK retail sector.
“There’s not a doubt in my mind that there is no growth in the retail sector,” noted John Saffrey, chief research officer at Macquarie, which has estimated the future of the UK retail industry at £19.2bn by 2020.
‘Great recovery’
Saffrey said: “The big picture is that we’ve got much more activity than we have at the beginning of 2011… So people are more confident now about what will happen next year.”
The WPP chief executive was forced to call the results “a terrible first day” when the results came out in January but is confident that they are “not going to be like that”.
He is adamant there will be “no repeat of what happened in 2007”.
The company’s share price was already under pressure