BOWOOD
23 Mar 2018
Re: Is there any value? When two top men who have always spoken their keenness in their roles leave there is clearly something wrong. Sell if you can.
Another Jacko
18 Mar 2018
Is there any value? I wonder if there is any value in this business? The high st shops appear to lose money but they claim the factory shops are performing well. I don't know how much of that cash is left but unless results have got a lot worse since they last reported then they are trading at quite a steep discount to TNAV.At this stage I don't think i'll bother but i'll keep an eye on them.
BOWOOD
12 Jan 2018
Re: 3 shops shut Yep the Ugly Sisters will probably swoop at about 5p
CASTLEFORD TIGER
12 Jan 2018
Re: 3 shops shut shareholders will be wiped out this year.That's my view on this onebesttiger
BOWOOD
11 Jan 2018
Re: 3 shops shut Thanks for that. i do feel this year will be a massive struggle with all the majors pitching for consumers reduced spending ability.
CASTLEFORD TIGER
10 Jan 2018
Re: 3 shops shut [link] THAT FOR starters.Tiger
BOWOOD
10 Jan 2018
Re: 3 shops shut How do we know that?
CASTLEFORD TIGER
10 Jan 2018
3 shops shut post Xmas
CASTLEFORD TIGER
05 Jan 2018
Re: life belt As I was saying the only good bit.AVOIDTiger
BOWOOD
28 Apr 2017
Re: life belt MC about £45m and another 21pc to be issued at 15.2p. Currently losing money and will need to make a post tax profit of about £5m to justify a PE of about 12. Hardly cheap.
CASTLEFORD TIGER
28 Apr 2017
life belt This maybe it.The factory store roll out may save the day.tiger
Contrariwise
28 Apr 2017
Out Made 20% in 2 days, i.e. £2k. Don't like this company: directors pay themselves too much; the results are heavily manipulated and opaque; company directors happy to pursue deals without consulting shareholders; business failing. Yes it's a recovery play, but there seems to be little reason for the current market optimism.
BOWOOD
28 Apr 2017
Re: Good Paul Scott analysis of the 2Sis... Directors still buying to help support what they have done. But of course the main man left for whatever reason.
BOWOOD
27 Apr 2017
Re: Good Paul Scott analysis of the 2Sisters... I will have no sympathy if buyers at this level - 30p see that within three months they are losing money.
Contrariwise
27 Apr 2017
Good Paul Scott analysis of the 2Sisters deal Bottom line: results show a company in big trouble (CEO's pay of £328k for presiding over the incineration of company profits is absolutely disgraceful), so he thinks that the link up with 2Sisters will provide new low-cost supply and accelerate the rollout of factory stores. He is a buyer. Crawshaw (LON:CRAW)Share price: 23.75p (down 21.5% today)No. shares: 79.2mMarket cap: £18.8mFinal results - for the 52 weeks ended 29 Jan 2017.This is a chain of butchers + hot takeaway food, mainly based in the North and Midlands. The company added 11 new sites in the year, taking the total to 49 sites at year end.As is clear from the figures today, this is a roll-out that has gone wrong. We already knew that though, as a series of poor trading updates have already crashed the share price from a peak of about 95p 18 months ago, to just 24p today. It's been even lower too - I sold mine near recent lows and only got something like 16-18p for them, from memory. Poor timing, as usual on sells! It's just so difficult to decide when to sell, I'm hopeless at that aspect of investing.A few key figures from today's results;Revenue up 19.3% to £44.2mOperating loss of £1.4m (prior year £0.4m loss)EBITDA of £0.1m positive (prior year £1.0m positive)So a clear deterioration in performance - which isn't what's supposed to happen when you're doing a roll-out. Each new store is supposed to bring additional profit, so clearly things are not working out very well here.New sites - opening 11 new sites will definitely create additional pre-opening costs, and so the company does what Tasty (LON:TAST) did recently, and massages the figures to report a supposedly higher underlying EBITDA performance.I think it's fine in principle to flag up genuine pre-opening costs (e.g. wages for staff being trained, before the site actually opens), and perhaps some Head Office costs related to new site openings. However, the same as with Tasty, I think Crawshaws has been way too aggressive with this process, and hence the numbers lack credibility.Crawshaws says today;*Adjusted EBITDA is defined by Group as profit/loss before tax, exceptional items, depreciation, amortisation, profit/(loss) on disposal of assets, net finance costs, share based payment charges attributable to the LTIP Growth Share Scheme and Accelerated Opening Costs.Accelerated opening costs are defined by the Group as the overhead investment in people, processes, systems and new store pre-opening costs i.e. costs directly associated with our accelerated store opening programme.In the period these costs amounted to £1.2m (2016: £1.6m) resulting in an adjusted EBITDA of £1.3m (2016: £2.6m).Those figures look daft to me. Claiming accelerated opening costs of £1.2m, for 11 relatively small sites, is £109k per site! That's ridiculous. A credible figure, for this type of business, would in my view be about £20k per site. So I am just treating the adjusted EBITDA figure with the contempt it deserves.Also, given the dismal share price performance, why are there any share based payment charges at all?Director remuneration - shareholders may well question why the CEO is being paid so much? A salary of £326k for Noel Collett, looks ridiculous to me - given that he's made a complete hash of the job so far. This seems a good example of how a bigger company executive can often flounder in a smaller, more entrepreneurial business.He's made basic mistakes - including not understanding that Crawshaws is a discounter, and instead alienating customers by pushing up prices, to drive higher gross margins. That strategy has failed - as demonstrated by these poor figures.LFL sales were significantly negative for the year, at minus 7.3%. The company can however point to an improving (but still negative) trend;Like-for-like sales have improved from -13.0% in Q3 to -7.4% in Q4 further progressing to -4.5% in the first 10 weeks of the F
