Orders up for Pittards
UK-based leather group Pittards has said it will confirm its results for 2021 on March 23, but has explained in a trading update that it expects sales revenues for last year to be £19.8 million, an increase of 30% compared to the year before.
It said it expects this to yield a profit of £500,000; last year’s result was a loss of £2.3 million.
In the same update, Pittards said its order book was 25% fuller in January 2022 than a year earlier.
“The well documented disruption in the global shipping and transport market impacted our supply chains,” the group explained. “Cases of covid directly impacted production capacity and distribution performance across our business and supply chains.”
It said it had taken a strategic decision to increase raw material inventory to counter supply chain issues. This resulted in more material being in transit than usual from its tannery in Ethiopia at year end. It had sheep skin raw material worth £1.1 million in transit at year end.
Pittards said it remained cautious in the short term, but that it hoped the pandemic was “now evolving through a final phase to enable a recovery to more normal conditions”.
It said in the same trading update that its chief financial officer, Richard Briere, is to leave to take up a senior role in private equity. He will remain a director of the company until his departure in April. The company is actively recruiting his replacement.
