Crawshaw Group Regulatory News (CRAW)

Thursday 26th June 2014

Crawshaw Group Plc

AGM trading and strategic update

At our AGM today, Richard Rose will give the following trading and strategic update:-

We continue to trade very strongly with year to date LFL sales up 13.4%. We are delighted with this performance given LFL sales were up 8% through May and June last year. The strong performance is widely spread across our store portfolio and, added to this, our reduced cost new store fit out has worked well.

The board are now working on a plan to greatly accelerate our store roll out, and to build a National network of stores. Having proven our retail model in the North of England we believe we are ready to take the concept across the UK.

We will be building our resource to support this strategic move, and intend to begin by recruiting a Chief Executive Officer with relevant experience to lead this exciting phase of our growth and to support Kevin Boyd who will remain our Managing Director.

As a first step we have signed a 10 year agreement for lease on a new factory and distribution centre in Rotherham and will consolidate our two existing sites in Grimsby and Rotherham into this new facility. The space at the new site will give us much additional capacity and is better located which we believe will lead to a more productive and efficient operation. Running costs are expected to be slightly less than our current set up, and we will open a factory shop on the site which we expect to trade well given the performance of our existing out of town store in Scunthorpe.

We are extremely excited by this opportunity and look forward to the future with great confidence.