Sosandar (LON:SOS) Joint CEOs, Ali Hall and Julie Lavington and CFO, Steve Dilks present a Trading and Strategic Update for the first half of 2024, outlining the company’s performance as well as their omnichannel strategy, launching its first bricks and mortar stores plus international launches in Australia and Canada.
Watch the video here.
Or listen to the podcast here.
An active private investor in small caps: growth/value. Co-Founder of piworld.co.uk which provides videos of company presentations, management interviews, investor interviews & webinars, to enable investors to make informed decisions.
Re Sosandar (LON:SOS) - having just seen the (controlled) interview ie no unplanned Questions, I came away much happier about the move into physical stores. The comparison with the 3 competitors; the 50 towns target using customer heat maps from online and with specific places : Cheltenham, Chichester etc makes sense; the CAPEX per store and payback sounds reasonable; I liked the comment that expanding with experienced 3rd Party logistics eases the strain of expansion
However, they is still a screaming gap in terms of showing where this years profit went - a waterfall chart rather than waffle about the trial of less price promotion, investment in market research and some additional headcount. Basically this loss of short term profit has just not been explained.
The international opportunity was also under-explained - a few slides on why the Bay and iconic fit and what scale of revenue were expected should have been a minimum. If it is small, why do it. If it large, tell me. No revenue gain is easy, who is going to travel to build relations. If they had to choose international or stores which would they do? I would have preferred them done sequentially not concurrently.
I thought the comments that Next and M&S were the big 3rd party sellers, that John Lewis loss hardly mattered (some data here would help - the big 2 80% of this channel of revenue? If my guess at the figure implied is correct then a NEXT equity stake must be quite a possibility at some point.
The lack of clear communication to the small investor base has lead to the share price halving. I hope the PR company is sacked - this is not the first cock up in communications. I dont expect the CEO's to do the PR but they ultimately hold responsibility for the agencies they hire. PR has been a rare mistake.
I hold and will keep for now - and I might buy more....especially if the PR firm is replaced! The 3 competitors are all private, Sosandar (LON:SOS) is listed - that makes a big difference.
