Online womenswear firm Sosandar (SOS) has seen sales soar thanks to booming demand for animal print dresses and leather pencil skirts. The firm, founded by two former Look magazine editors, is expected to announce a 228% rise in full-year sales to £4.4million. Repeat orders increased by 389% in the year to April, and the average order value rose 10% to £103.19. Sosandar is the brainchild of Ali Hall and Julie Lavington who started the business after struggling to find fashionable but affordable clothes for women over the age of 30. Best-sellers include denim dresses which sell for £69 and a leather A-line dress which costs £199. Sosandar listed on AIM in 2017 and has grown in popularity, with celebrities such as Fearne Cotton and Denise Van Outen among its customers.
tycoon Mike Ashley suffered a humiliating defeat after his dogged attempts to take over Debenhams (DEB) were knocked back – wiping out his entire investment. The retail mogul is thought to have lost as much as £150million from his 29.9% stake in Debenhams after the department store crashed into administration and was placed into the hands of its lenders. The so-called pre-pack administration – where the outcome with the lenders was agreed before the administrators were called in – left shareholders with nothing. ‘It’s game over for Mike Ashley and Debenhams shareholders,’ said Laith Khalaf, senior analyst at Hargreaves Lansdown.
Bosses at banknote maker De La Rue (DLAR) are fighting for their jobs after a leading investor branded the floundering company’s performance ‘unacceptable’. In an update to its own investors yesterday, activist fund Crystal Amber said the company’s management must start making changes to boost the value of its shares. Crystal Amber has a 5.5% stake in De La Rue worth £24million. Since De La Rue lost the contract to make Britain’s post-Brexit blue passports to Franco-Dutch rival Gemalto last year, its stock has tumbled by 28%. Crystal Amber, run by City veteran Richard Bernstein, said it had engaged extensively with the banknote and ID manufacturer and made ‘constructive suggestions and specific proposals’ as to how De La Rue could move on after the humiliating passport defeat. But it criticised chief executive Martin Sutherland and chairman Philip Rogerson for failing to put these ideas into action, and said it wants to see signs of improvement by De La Rue’s full year results announcement at the end of May.
Hundreds of workers could lose their jobs as part of a reshuffle at Barclays (BARC). The bank is moving 400 technology and customer service positions to Glasgow, Manchester and Northampton. The roles will be shifted from other offices around Britain, with Coventry and Birmingham hardest hit. Workers will be given the option to relocate, but face redundancy if they do not. Meanwhile another 54 jobs are being axed altogether.
Standard Chartered (STAN) let a customer open a bank account using a suitcase stuffed with £500,000 in cash in a shocking money laundering breach. Another client of the London-based lender was allowed to export products with military uses to more than 75 countries without proper checks, including two where wars were raging. The errors were revealed in a damning report by the Financial Conduct Authority, as the bank was fined £828million following long-running claims it busted sanctions in Iran. Standard Chartered chief executive Bill Winters said the breaches were ‘completely unacceptable’. The bank’s Dubai branch handled hundreds of millions of pounds between 2008 and 2014 on behalf of clients in Iran and other countries blacklisted by the US.
Cyber security company Shearwater Group (SWG) staged a mini recovery as it announced a deal to acquire assets from rival Secarma for £7.4million. The new units will focus on testing how attackers can exploit businesses’ online operations, analysing and monitoring threats, and deliberately hacking systems to find weaknesses. Chairman David Williams said Shearwater had seen rising demand for these particular types of services.
As crunch time approaches for Sirius Minerals (SXX), the fertiliser company boring a massive tunnel underneath the North York Moors, investors have been eagerly snapping up its shares. Sirius is trying to thrash out a financing agreement worth more than £2.5billion with an unnamed major financial institution, which should secure the construction of its Yorkshire polyhalite mine. Though the firm is unlikely to announce any progress on whether it has secured a deal with the new lender before the end of April, the market is already getting excited. The new cash should allow Sirius, which is a favourite with retail investors, the opportunity to turn its hole in the ground into a functional fertiliser mine and remove most of the risk from the project. Shares shot up 1.22p, to 23.3p yesterday, – even as US conglomerate The Capital Group Companies, a major shareholder, revealed it had sold down a stake worth around £22million on Friday.
Investors in drugs giant GlaxoSmithKline (GSK) were largely unmoved by US medical regulators’ approval of a new HIV treatment, created by GSK and Pfizer. The drug, Dovato, is the first ever once-daily single tablet containing two drugs, rather than three, to help treat HIV.
ReNeuron Group (RENE) shot up by 29.8%, or 51p, to 222p. The firm is developing new types of stem cell treatments for diseases such as blindness-causing retinitis pigmentosa, and revealed it was licensing the rights to some of its programmes to Chinese pharmaceutical giant Fosun. In return, it will be paid up to £80million if all milestones are met.
N4 Pharma (N4P) is developing a new way to deliver vaccines and cancer treatments to patients, crashed 43%, or 3.45p, to 4.55p. The results of its tests with the University of Adelaide have so far not been positive and its Nuvec treatment has not been effective on living organisms.
Hornby (HRN), which has been trying to put issues surrounding late orders and lack of stock behind it for over a year, came further off the rails as it conceded revenue for the year ending March 2019 was still lower than the previous 12 months. The company said it was progressing with its turnaround.
