Card Factory Share Price (CARD)

No wait, I said it was offline. Ignore the correction. *slaps face*

Whoops, many typos, but here is a main one : dedicated value sellers have taken the main of it -> dedicated value sellers have taken the main of it subsequent to the pandemic

Finally on this point, I would like to say that I believe a significant amount of the UK population will give a significant amount of greetings cards in fifty years time. It may be fewer than today, but they will still exist. I can’t help thinking that viewing this as a dying business and turning your nose up at it would be like saying tobacco was a bad investment 30-40-50 years ago, with the exception that domestically in the UK, I anticipate more participation in card giving than smoking in the future.

In respect of pricing destroying demand, the price of card bought at Card Factory increased by a little over eleeven percent, and the general market increased by over sixteen. The increases were not significantly out of line with general inflation and were significantly below competitors, maintaining the value appeal. I do not think pricing is affecting demand, and the annual reports corroborate that with stable trasnaction volumes, increased levels in the prior year, and an increase in the proportion of adults visiting stores.

Basket composition has adapted, and it is not harming the business, and it is simply the way the market is going. I don’t have the time to go into detail here, sorry.

I will just conclude that I believe this is in no way a speculative investment, if such a thing exists. It seem stable, reliable and highly cash-generative with a low level of leverage.

@JonnyGee So, I didn't get much time here, but have managed to flesh out something of a response. Although I haven't really had enough time to everything I wanted to post here, I will post what I have managed to clean up.

Card volumes are in decline. I struggled to validate your statement of 990m cards sold in 2018. The 779 indicates you are using Card Factory's observations, and the figure I read was 888m cards in total. That being said, other sources quote the figure higher, but the declines run in proportion, anyway. It may be that it was hard to glean reliable figures that used a consistent methodology in relation to single and boxed cards, which was not always made clear.

Anyway, while from point to point over the period of 18 years volumes have declined, the value of the card market has increased every single year aside from the covid-impacted years and one source that says card market value was flat pre-covid to post-covid, though. In terms of how that market value appreciation has been shared across different segments of offline card sellers, dedicated value sellers have taken the main of it, and Card Factory's revenue from cards exceeded the average dedicated value retailers market value by at least 100% in the past year. Not only is it positioned in the winning segment, it is substantially exceeding that segment in terms of value growth from cards.

The annualised volume decline of the card market was a little under two and a half percent for the entire market and just under four and a half percent for physical stores, with a substantial amount of that rate being attributed to the acceleration of the shift to the use of online retailers, which has continued to regress and underperform stores post-covid. While an eight percent decline seems like a scary figure, we saw a total market increase in 2022 of just under five. This actually bought the decline in volumes from the 2019 figure to less than a total of three percent in 2022, and the annualised rate of decline to a less scary rate of just over two and three quarters. It is important to note that the increase in volumes in 2022 was not an isolated event. It has happened before infrequently and given the economic backdrop of the past year, I would not be surprised to see a small increase in volumes for this year. In terms of the drop in volumes for physical retailers for the past year, it was around six and a quarter ppt, and Card Factory’s was four and three quarters, significantly outperforming the outperforming segment in both value and volume. When taking into account cards sold online, Card Factory’s volumes declined by five and three quarters, again outperforming the drop of eight percent. None of these figures include cards not sold directly, meaning volumes in total will actually be better than the above.

Maybe. Hopefully they dump a load more and crash the SP to the mid 80's in short order, so I can buy some more.

Anyway, there is now no short interest here over the disclosed threshold, so perhaps 'the market' is not so confident in that assertion. Would be an easy short otherwise, IMO. GLA while we wait to see what the next few months bring.