By Corina Pons and Helen Reid
MADRID (Reuters) -Zara owner Inditex (BME:) posted a rare miss on third-quarter sales on Wednesday but the world’s biggest listed fast-fashion retailer said the holiday shopping season had got off to a good start.
Sales of 9.36 billion euros came in below the 9.51 billion expected by analysts. An 8.5% rise in nine-month net profit to 4.44 billion euros also lagged the 4.52 billion expected by analysts.
Severe flooding at the end of October in Spain, Inditex’s biggest market, likely hurt the retailer’s performance, analysts said, though the company gave no reason for the miss.
Inditex reported a good start to the holiday season though, with revenues rising 9% in currency-adjusted terms during the six weeks to Dec. 9, which includes the key Black Friday sales. Still, that was slower than the 14% sales growth reported a year ago.
“We had a strong start to the last quarter against a demanding comparable in the same period of 2023,” Inditex’s capital market director, Marcos Lopez, told Reuters.
He said currency-adjusted sales growth was 10.5% in the first nine months of the fiscal year and currency-adjusted growth in constant currency during the third quarter was the fastest of the year.
Analysts had expected an impact from floods in Spain, Inditex’s biggest market.
Clothing sales in Spain overall fell 2.8% in November as Black Friday promotions failed to attract enough shoppers, according to fashion retailers’ association Acotex.
Shares in Inditex fell 6% at the open.
($1 = 0.9500 euros)
