Fishing Republic – the decline and fall

PUBLISHED: May 03 2018 @ 10:34 | Comments (0) |

Fishing Republic (LSE:FISH), is a tiny company (I resisted the temptation to say tiddler!), which swam along (sorry – end of puns) nicely with seven shops and a couple of websites for many years making between £200,000 and £280,000 after-tax profits annually for its owners, Steve and Zoe Gross. Then, they came to market raising £1.05m to invest in the seven stores but also to expand outside of its northern base and build up an internet presence.

It started so well

Steve and Zoe had long had their eye on an out-of-town 5,300sqft unit in South Birmingham. The plan was to put £350,000 of the IPO proceeds toward the fit-out and stock.

Another £450,000 was to beef up online impact and sales, particularly with their own websites rather than selling through eBay and Amazon, as well as general capex expenditure and working capital investment. The remaining £250,000 was for an “acquisition find”.

In preparation, another £0.5m was raised by placing 3.125m shares at 16p in December 2015.

As well as opening in Birmingham in Spring 2016 the Hull outlet was moved to 9,000sqft unit, and the business and assets of Cotswolds Angling (Swindon) were purchased for £0.17m cash. The Swindon operation was making only “a marginal profit”.

Also they signed up for a new 11,000sqft store in Crewe which opened in Spring 2016.

This rate of growth for a company that does not have the personnel with experience of this sort of thing worries me. My wife and I were badly burnt back in the 1990s when we went from one retail outlet to four in the space of two years. A lot of lessons were learned, not

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