The last few years have been challenging for the company, which has been managing decline in its traditional newspaper and magazine distribution business whilst focussing on its broader distribution offering. Having sold off its Education and Care division earlier this year, the group now operates across three key divisions: News & Media (at the heart of which sits Smiths News, the UK’s leading newspaper and magazine distributor), Books and Parcel Freight (predominantly under the Tuffnells brand).
Following a strategic review earlier this year, the group now has centralised leadership teams across all of its divisions with the primary aim of becoming more efficient. Reducing costs is particularly vital in the News & Media division as the downward trend in newspaper and magazine sales looks set to continue – it is therefore encouraging to see that profits for Smiths News rose by £2.7m this year.
Unfortunately, the growing areas of the business did not perform quite so well, with Tuffnells seeing operating profits fall by 20% despite an increase in volumes. The division faced higher variable costs due to erratic volumes on top of one-off costs to upgrade depot facilities. Pass My Parcel, the ‘click-and-collect’ business, is delivering strong volume growth thanks in part to the introduction of a returns service for Amazon late this year. However, the business is still loss-making at this early stage of its growth and is not expected to break even till the end of 2019.
Investors have reacted positively to the update, driving a significant recovery in the share price following a period of weakness. Looking forward, the shares still look cheap on many metrics – although management must ultimately convince the market that the growth areas of the business can offset decline in the traditional newspaper and magazine distribution market.