Fishing tackle retailer enters administration
Fishing tackle retailer Fishing Republic has entered administrators after failing to raise enough funding to continue trading.
The Rotherham-headquartered listed firm has this afternoon announced that, further to recent notifications, Andrew Poxon and Julien Irving of Leonard Curtis Recovery Limited have today been appointed Joint Administrators of Fishing Republic.
The company also announced that Northland Capital Partners has resigned as Nominated Adviser and Broker with immediate effect.
If the Company fails to appoint a replacement Nominated Adviser within one month of the date of Northland’s resignation, admission of the Company’s shares to trading on AIM will be cancelled.
The announcement comes after an October announcement from the firm that the business had suspended trading its shares on the Alternative Investment Market after certain major shareholders were no longer willing to provide further short-term financial assistance.
Almost one month later, Fishing Republic revealed it was seeking to raise equity finance to fund its immediate and future working capital requirements.
After failing to secure additional financial support, the company has now filed for administration. The company’s shares remain suspended from trading on AIM.
Today’s announcement follows a disappointing year for the firm, with several senior management changes amid a turnaround that the firm was trying to implement. In May, the firm reported pre-tax losses of £2.2m during 2017, despite growing revenues 57%.
Reporting on the full year to December 31 2017, the firm reported pre-tax losses of £2.2m, a drop from pre-tax profits of £320,771 in 2016. The firm’s revenues grew 57% from £5.7m in 2016 to of £9.1m in 2017. At the time, it said that like-for-like store sales during 2017 were up 12.4% year-on-year.
In November 2017, the business confirmed that it had suffered a significant deterioration in trading, which led to its CEO Steve Gross stepping down and replaced by Chris Griffin as acting chief executive. Griffin has since left the business and a new COO – Stephen Kyriacou – was appointed.
Then in September this year, Daniel Quinn, who had been the commercial director at Go Outdoors for six years, was announced as the firm’s new CEO. James Newman, who has been acting in an executive capacity, resumed his role as non-executive chairman.
The firm was amid implementing a turnaround plan and a £1.3m share placing was completed in January 2018 as part of this.
