The US clothing retailer Abercrombie & Fitch Co. will not be able to meet its own expectations in the fourth quarter of the 2021/22 financial year. This emerges from an interim announcement that the parent company of the brands Abercrombie & Fitch, Hollister and Gilly Hicks published on Monday in advance of a digital investor conference.
The company cited bottlenecks in the global supply chains as the reason, which led to insufficient goods in stock during the Christmas season. “We believe that if these inventories had been available, we would have achieved sales in line with our forecast,” said CEO Fran Horowitz. However, she also highlighted the generally “high demand” for the company’s products and emphasized that the sales trend “accelerated” after the holidays when the late deliveries had arrived.
However, the company can no longer achieve its forecasts for the fourth quarter, which will end at the end of January. It now only expects sales to grow by four to six percent compared to the same period in the previous year. Compared to the final quarter of the pre-crisis year 2019/20, revenues would at best remain stable or even decline by up to two percent. Originally, the group had expected growth of three to five percent here. The group stuck to its forecast for the gross margin. Additional costs as a result of the delivery bottlenecks were compensated, among other things, by restricting price reductions, the company said.
For the entire 2021/22 financial year, management is now anticipating a 19 to 20 percent increase in sales compared to the previous year and two to three percent compared to 2019/20. The operating margin is expected to reach nine to ten percent and thus be in line with previous forecasts, said Abercrombie & Fitch.