Festive cheer round the corner for Park Group

Chris Houghton

Merseyside-based Park Group, the gift voucher and prepaid gift card business, is predicting the Christmas season will project it into profit.

The Birkenhead company traditionally makes a first-half loss ahead of the festive period and interim results for the six months to September 30 have continued that trend with a pre-tax minus of £1.6m compared to £0.8m for the same period in 2016.

However, more than £13m of orders have already been placed for Christmas 2018 through the company’s mobile app, prompting the listed firm to forecast a bright future.

Some 31 client businesses are also using its Love2shop Worldwide offering to incentivise and reward their staff and customers across a number of different countries including the UK, Ireland, Italy, India, Australia and USA.

Non-executive chairman Laura Carstensen said: “The performance of the first half is being maintained across our corporate and consumer businesses, with trading continuing in line with the board’s expectations.

“Our operations are expanding as we capitalise on the opportunities generated by ongoing enhancement of our product ranges, enabling us to grow our customer base, while also reaching new markets and territories.”

Chief executive Chris Houghton highlighted the £13m of advance orders for Christmas 2018, placed by about 40,000 of the company’s customers.

He told TheBusinessDesk, the much-much-talked-about squeeze on incomes across the UK was not affecting the company adversely.

“We’ve always been pretty recession resilient,” he said. “Our average orders have grown more than inflation and we always tend to do reasonably well through tight periods.”

He said the half-year figures had been affected by customer requests for early dispatches of goods, which means Park has to buy them earlier.

Close