The Irish division of Next, a retailer that offers a variety of products such as clothes, shoes, jewellery, beauty items, and home goods via its 23 branches, revealed a surge of 53% in profits last year. As per the annual accounts submitted to the Companies Registration Office for the year through 27th January 2024, the company’s post-tax profits were slightly more than €4 million. This marked an increase from slightly less than €2.7 million the previous year. Despite a decrease in turnover from €87.7 million in 2023 to slightly sub €86 million, the total assets experienced a substantial growth of 50%, from €11.1 million to €16.7 million.
While the total staff of the company saw a slight dip from 854 to 846 during this year, workforce expenditure fell from €13.6 million to €13.1 million. The company maintained that despite the complexities owing to macroeconomic factors, particularly the prevalent inflation rates, business is progressing as expected. No dividends were disbursed during this financial duration and none were proposed for future issuance by the directors either.
The company is focusing on managing overall financial health, cash flows, and liquidity, while trading across its stores. Next’s overall group is expected to make a near £1 billion (roughly €1.2 billion) profit this year. Since outperforming recent marketing anticipations, the company has subsequently increased its outlook twice in two months. With its substantial consumer base in both Ireland and the UK, and nearly 8 million online shoppers, Next serves as a reliable measure of consumer performance.
Having reported a 7.1% increase in pre-tax profits for the first 6 months up to July, and considering the first 6 weeks of its second half as having “materially exceeded” expectations with a rise of 6.9%, the retailer has revised its forecast for 2nd half sales growth to 3.7% from earlier guidance of 2.5%.
The firm now anticipates a pre-tax profit of £995 million for the entire fiscal year 2024/25, surpassing the earlier forecast of £980 million, which corresponds to an 8.4 per cent surge from 2023/24.