Asos has slumped to a wider full-year loss as it said customers are still grappling with cost of living pressures but insisted it was seeing “green shoots” of recovery after a two-year turnaround. José Antonio Ramos Calamonte, the Asos chief executive, said the market was still “volatile”. “I don’t think by any stretch of imagination things have got significantly better than where they were six months ago.
They are not getting worse, which is good news, but there’s still a lot of volatility out there,” he added. Sales in the UK fell by 12% in the year to 1 September as a result of the cost of living challenges, which particularly affected the fashion retail sector, the online retailer said. Overall revenues were down by 16% to £2.
9bn, and Asos’s pre-tax losses widened to £379.3m from £296.7m.
The news drove its share price down by more than 6%. The company was left with a £1.1bn pile of unsold clothes after the Covid-19 pandemic, but said it had halved this over the past two years by selling items at a discount.
It is focusing on a new product model to bring new clothes from design to its website in less than three weeks, as well as lowering the returns rate. “We have changed most of our processes. We have set up from scratch a completely new way of buying that we call test and react.
That is a massive change,” Calamonte said, adding that Asos has seen the “green shoots in the performance of our new stock in recent months”. It expects adjusted .
