Naked Wine Share News (WINE)

(Correcting that Naked Wines announced the sale of its Majestic Wine and Les Celliers de Calaisin units in August 2019 and completed the sale in December 2019.)

(Alliance News) - Naked Wines PLC on Friday reported surging annual revenue, helped by growth in the US and from a shift to online purchasing due to pub and bar closures because of the pandemic.

Revenue for the financial year ended March 29 grew 68% to GBP340.2 million, with "strong growth" across all geographies.

The US market saw particularly buoyant growth, where sales were up 78% to GBP161.7 million. The US now represents 48% of total sales.

The online wine retailer described a record performance in an "unprecedented year", after benefiting from the closure of pubs and bars for much of the year, as wine enthusiasts moved online.

Despite sales growth, Naked Wines posted a widened pretax loss of GBP10.7 million from GBP5.4 million the year before. The wider loss was partly due to a fair value adjustment of deferred consideration from the sale of Majestic Wine. Adjusted pretax loss narrowed to GBP500,000 from GBP2.9 million.

Naked Wines announced the GBP95 million sale of its Majestic Wine and Les Celliers de Calaisin units in August 2019. Following this, it changed its name to Naked Wines from Majestic Wine and became an entirely online business once the deal was completed in December of that year.

"Since inception, our mission at Naked has been simple - to disrupt the wine industry for the benefit of customers, our winemakers and our people," commented Chief Executive Nick Devlin.

"In financial year 2021, we made significant progress towards this objective. It is clear to us that the pandemic has served to underscore the value of our business model in connecting winemakers and consumers directly and proven the opportunity before us."

Looking ahead, Naked Wines reaffirmed plans to increase its focus on the US, which it expects to drive sales growth going forward.

The first two months of its new financial year have seen resilient repeat customer sales growth, it said, up 30%.

Sales of between GBP355 million and GBP375 million are expected for financial year 2022, which would be up by between 4.4% and 10% on financial 2021.

Naked Wines declared no dividend for the recent financial year, nor for the year before.

Shares in the company were down 2.3% at 775.00 pence each in London on Friday.

By Will Paige; willpaige@alliancenews.com

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