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Retail: CFOs find their priority is all about the data

30.09.2011
The British high street isn't a happy place. Rising input costs and taxes combined with falling wages and consumer spending makes for a particularly unpleasant cocktail. And while it's a cocktail that retail CFOs have been supping for some time, there's no doubt that the sector is in chronic need of a pick me up.

The litany of organisations - many household names - that have gone to the wall this year illustrate the problem well - Oddbins, Habitat, Focus DIY, Jane Norman, Dolphin, Moben, Lombok � retailers that have, for one reason or another, failed to make ends meet.

Others have fared little better. Carpetright, HMV, Thorntons, JJB Sports, Dixons Retail, Blacks, among others, have been forced into various emergency measures, from store closures and redundancies to profit warnings and restructuring.

It is, to put it mildly, a pretty bleak outlook.

The trouble facing the sector is borne out in data from the Office for National Statistics, the latest of which show that there was no growth in the volume of sales between August 2010 and August 2011. While the value of sales increased by 4.7 percent, much of this can be attributed to the increase in VAT with the remainder to rising input costs.

But the retail space is also diverse. For some, such as discount stores and value supermarkets, difficult economic times can provide a boost; for others, such as home furnishings, the exact opposite is true.