Deeply annoying thing #1. Typing the name of a £1.4bn listed company into your preferred search engine and not immediately being able to find their corporate site. No, I would not like to purchase the latest luminous yellow, Nike football boots. I would like to read your preliminary results.
Deeply annoying thing #2. Locating the results announcement, which runs to 41 pages, and discovering it does not include a latest like-for-like sales figure. For a retailer.
Deeply annoying thing #3. Calling up the PRs, who (poor sods) have been on the job barely 3 months, to discover everyone at the company is tied up until after 11am – meanwhile the company’s shares are falling rapidly, down about 15 per cent.
Sports Direct International, or specifically Mike Ashley, its founder, has not behaved in a manner befitting the figurehead of a large plc since the company listed in February. That as much as anything else accounts for the company’s slide from a value of £2.16bn to its current level. In fact, as the shares tanked on Tuesday morning, the company hit yet another dubious landmark – the loss of £1bn in value in the five months since its IPO.
The shares slumped to 161p from their Monday close of 190p, as investors digested the rather dismal outlook from the sports retailer. The first three months of the current financial year had been “exceptionally difficult” it said, with “unprecedented weather conditions” having an immediate impact on sales.
Blaming the weather – deeply annoying thing #4.
Then there were profits last year – ebitda rose 32 per cent last year to £191m, the company said. But there was a £14.7m gain in that figure on a “property transaction.” Hang on a minute – there’s a correction. The gain was only £10m at the profit line, it later added – £14.7m was the transaction value, on what was a churning of the company’s property portfolio as part of the normal run of business.
Word has reached the FT Alphaville desk that the Sports Direct team were up until 3am working on the wording of Tuesday’s statement. And it shows.
But then Mr Ashley is a maverick; an eccentric businessman used to doing things his own way and who prefers to avoid the limelight. Great at growing a business; bad at publicly representing and explaining a business. Anyone who thought that a wholesale personality transplant for Mr Ashley came as part of a package deal with the company’s IPO was living in la-la land – and is now paying for it.
£1bn and counting…