Northamber’s performance woes continue with bigger loss

Falling sales and widening losses continued at distributor Northamber for the full year ended 30 June.

Despite the distie’s continuing fail, chairman David Phillips said: “As we continue our transition into more consultative, solution driven sales, I am pleased to be able to announce an increase in gross profit to £4.8 million, driven by a gross margin improvement to 7.8 percent.

“This is a significant increase from just over 7 percent for the previous year, especially against a challenging industry background and shows the traction we are making in evolving the business.”

But, he added: “Unfortunately, whilst margins increased, so did losses. This stemmed from increased administration costs, of which recruitment was a significant contributor, as we invested in building our future presence in strategically important categories and sectors organically.

“As we increased our focus on these higher margin solutions categories, we also moved
away from some of our lower margin, more transactional business, leading to an overall reduction in turnover of some £3.6 million.”

Annual turnover slumped to £61.8 million compared with £65.4 million in 2015. The company reported an operating loss of £1.29 million – up £360,000 on last year.

“At a total cost of £28,159 your board is proposing a final dividend of 0.1p per share. The dividend will be paid on 18 January 2017,” said Phillips, so Christmas will certainly not be coming early for Northamber’s long-suffering shareholders.

@AntonySavvas